C. S. Lewis: Apostle to the Imagination

Everyman is tired. He’s tired of taxes. He’s tired of traffic jams. He’s tired of telephones, timetables, and TV dinners. He’s tired of promises, tired of threats. Tired of democrats, dandelions, deadlines, and demilitarized zones. He’s tired of shallow optimism, and shallow pessimism. He’s tired of pollution, corruption, and racism, and he’s tired of being blamed for them. He’s tired of false hopes, false friends, and false advertising. He’s tired of trying to make sense out of it all. Tired.

He feels that there must be some meaning behind the monotony, but he doesn’t even know where to look. He has tried cheap thrills, and not-so-cheap thrills, only to discover that pleasure wasn’t happiness and happiness wasn’t joy. He tried check books, hymn books, textbooks, and sex books, but it all was “striving after wind.” He even tried philosophy and theology, yet he could never get beyond the pious platitudes, formless generalities, and cold abstractions. The Church to him was just a collection of hypocrites, social workers, and tired old ladies. “If those are the people God works with, then, he must not be my kind of guy.” Gradually, Everyman’s search for meaning sagged into a resolve not to be engulfed by the meaninglessness that surrounded him. So one day, with civilization chattering all around him, he just stopped listening.

Once this state of mind has been reached (and it often is among moderns), Everyman is virtually impervious to traditional forms of persuasion. He is convinced that neither the Christian nor anyone else has anything to tell him. Christians have everything to tell him, but often they don’t know how to make him understand. An explanation of the internal and external consistency of their faith is likely to bore Everyman right out of the kingdom of heaven. A Pepsodent smile, an arm around the shoulder, and a promise of a new life style are likely to remind him of Madison Avenue’s latest scheme. He has endured so many frontal assaults on his intellect that he has reached his last, yet most impenetrable, line of defense: indifference.

Yet even while apathy and cynicism rule his rational faculties, his imagination remains free and active. He cannot maintain strict control over his imagination any more than over his heartbeat. For example, realizing that his fear of public speaking (or of the dark, or of heights) is irrational doesn’t help ease the fear. His intellect may declare ghosts to be an impossibility, but under certain scary conditions his imagination doesn’t make much of a distinction between possibilities and impossibilities. Imagination frees a man to fly to the moon and back in a second, to visualize an atom that his eyes can never see, or to feel angered and saddened as he reads of an unjust crucifixion that took place almost two thousand years ago.

Of course, the imagination is not merely a tool for taking mental vacations from “serious thinking.” In fact, “serious thinking” is often the process by which man’s rational faculty tries to organize and interpret the images it receives from his image-making faculty, the imagination. Whether one reacts to the image of immortality by building a complex philosophical system or by simply dreaming of the Happy Hunting Grounds, he is trying to be at peace with his imagination. As the Preacher tells us, “God has put eternity into man’s mind, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end” (Eccles. 3:11). Even though Everyman’s intellect has despaired of ever answering the question of meaning, his imagination does not stop asking it. He can stop listening, but he cannot stop wondering, for he has eternity in his mind.

C. S. Lewis was not a Christian apologist in the normal sense of the term; he was a Christian artist. This is precisely what makes his works so effective in helping non-Christians understand the real significance of Christianity. Lewis’s Christian world view does not appeal only to the intellect; it steals into the imagination.

Lewis viewed human imagination as an indispensable tool for understanding ourselves and our existence. This is well illustrated by his interpretation of myth. While most moderns consider myth a synonym for fiction, notes Clyde S. Kilby, Lewis defined myth as the “embodiment of universal truth” The Christian World of C. S. Lewis). He saw myths as reflections of the fundamental patterns of human existence. For example, in Perelandra Ransom discovers that the classical deities Mars and Venus are earthly images of Malacandra and Perelandra, and is told that “our mythology is based on a solider reality than we dream.” In That Hideous Strength Merlin walks right out of medieval legend to become one of the novel’s main protagonists. Till We Have Faces is actually a Christian myth; it is patterned after the story of Cupid and Psyche. In the preface to Pilgrim’s Regress, Lewis explains that “when allegory is at its best, it approaches myth, which must be grasped with the imagination, not with the intellect.” Since Lewis believed that the imagination was needed to unlock the meanings of the universe, his belief in the value of man’s imagination is obvious. Since he felt that the imagination was, in many cases, the most direct route to truth, it is not surprising that he took such care to try to capture the imagination of his readers.

One of Lewis’s primary goals in the space trilogy (Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength) is to instill a profound sense of the reality of the supernatural in the minds of his readers. Though this calls in part for a rational demonstration of the difficulties of the materialist view (which Lewis does in some of his expository writings, such as Miracles), it is primarily a matter of stimulating the imagination. If the question of God’s existence becomes firmly implanted in the imagination, it necessarily becomes urgent to the intellect.

Unlike many other fantasy writers, Lewis does not ask his readers to cast off all sentimental attachments to reality before venturing into his novels. Instead, he carefully juxtaposes the natural and supernatural realms until the distinction between them seems somewhat arbitrary. In That Hideous Strength he does this by placing what would normally be considered supernatural events into a naturalistic setting. He begins the novel by describing ordinary, even humdrum, persons and activities in such detail that the credibility of his account rests secure. Then come a few casual hints, and later more concrete clues, that something very unusual is taking place behind those everyday scenes. By the time the quiet little community of Edgestow has become a battlefield between the Forces of Good and the Forces of Evil, the reader is amazed to discover the awesome supernatural forces that lie just beneath the surface of the common workaday world. He feels a little like those who heard Orson Welles’s 1938 War of the Worlds radio broadcast, when a supposedly factual newscast began describing an interplanetary holocaust. Of course, the reader realizes he is only reading fiction; yet his imagination delights in every opportunity it gets to trample on the distinction between the real and the unreal.

Lewis also uses the opposite technique from the one described above for the same purpose, that of making the supernatural realm less remote: he takes common human experiences and charges them with significance by placing them in a supernatural context. For example, everyone has had the experience of thinking he was alone when suddenly, by some unknown perception, he feels there is someone in the room with him, someone silently watching, listening. He glances around, sees nothing, and shrugs the happening off as a little odd. In Perelandra, Ransom senses an unseen Presence whenever he attempts to assert his independence or to shy away from the hard task before him. The Presence is not a mere psychological curiosity; it communicates with Ransom (though not in words) whenever he needs to realize the flaws in his own rationalizations. Once this impression has entered into our imaginations, we cannot help recalling it whenever we have that sense of an unseen Person in our midst. The implication to the reader (and particularly to the Christian reader, who already considers himself under God’s guiding hand) is that his decisions do not affect himself and his immediate circumstances; each decision made is either in accordance with God’s plan or in defiance of it.

Another example of Lewis’s device of putting common experiences into supernatural settings is his description of eldils, or angels. He does not portray them as magnificent creatures clothed in radiant garments. Instead they are barely perceptible “footsteps of light.” In Ransom’s first encounter with an eldil (Out of the Silent Planet), he doesn’t even see it. The next one he meets can hardly be distinguished from the dance of sunlight on the lake. Once again, a spark has been lit in the reader’s imagination that will not easily die. After reading the trilogy he will probably find that every peculiar slant of light asks for a second look. “Why, that’s only the moonlight filtering through the trees. And yet, for a moment …”

In the space trilogy, Lewis crosses the barrier between the natural and the supernatural so often that it doesn’t seem much of a barrier at all. This effect is created primarily through literary “tricks” such as those discussed above. The trilogy is not intended to present tangible evidence for the supernatural. Our being able to picture eldils in our imagination does not mean that they really exist. However, in Pilgrim’s Regress, Lewis points out something in the human imagination that may indeed give us reason to suspect that the material realm is not the “whole show.”

Lewis calls it Sweet Desire, and symbolizes it as a recurring vision of a Beautiful Island. It is an “intense longing … in which the sense of want is acute, even painful, yet the mere wanting of it is felt to be somehow a delight” (preface to Pilgrim’s Regress). The object of this longing is never fully realized in this life. A man may spend his entire life trying to satisfy this longing, but even in his moments of greatest happiness, there comes an acute awareness that the longing is still there. Lewis’s theme in the Regress, expressed in the book’s preface, is this:

If a man diligently followed this desire, pursuing the false objects until their falsity appeared and then abandoning them, he must come out at last into the clear knowledge that the human soul was made to enjoy some object that is never fully given—nay, cannot even be imagined as given—in our present mode of subjective and spatio-temporal experience.

Sweet Desire, then, is a kind of unfocused God-consciousness that, if properly guided and refined, will ultimately find its rest in God. It is not just another literary device, nor a convenient organizing principle for, building an allegory. One finds reference to it throughout ancient and modern literature (though the authors, of course, show varying degrees of understanding of what it is).

To expose the false objects of Sweet Desire, and to point out the fallacies in various modern philosophies and religions, is essentially an intellectual task. However, by placing one man’s intellectual inquiry into the allegorical framework of Pilgrim’s Regress, Lewis is able, as Clyde S. Kilby points out, to “make the inner world more palpable by giving it an (imagined) concrete embodiment.”

Lewis is often successful in reaching the jaded intellect largely because he was an explorer as much as an explainer. Instead of battering the intellect with arguments for the existence of the supernatural, he simply stirs the reader’s imagination so that he can feel for himself that “every bush is the Burning Bush, and the world is ‘crowded with God.’ ” If this point has not yet been persuasive, perhaps this passage will make it clear:

When the servant of the man of God rose early in the morning and went out, behold, an army with horses and chariots was round about the city. And the servant said, “Alas, my master! What shall we do?” He said, “Fear not, for those who are with us are more than those who are with them.” Then Elisha prayed, and said, “O LORD, I pray thee, open his eyes that he may see.” So the LORD opened the eyes of the young man, and he saw; and behold, the mountain was full of horses and chariots of fire round about Elisha [2 Kings 6:15–17].

David Downing attends Westmont College, Santa Barbara.

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