C. S. Lewis and myths of dying gods

Supposal v. Allegory

John Bunyan, Pilgrim’s Progress; C. S. Lewis, Letters

A COMMON criticism of the Narnia stories is that they’re merely allegories — generally considered a fairly limited art form, wherein every part represents something in our own world. But, while that’s how a novel like John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress works, that’s not what Lewis intended within the Narnia stories.

Instead, Lewis himself explained that he set out to write down a “supposal” fairly than an allegory. He began by asking himself the query: “Let us suppose there have been a land like Narnia and that the Son of God, as He became a Man in our world, became a Lion there, after which imagine what would occur.”

FOR Lewis, the good value of stories is the best way they permit their readers to experience ideas fairly than simply take into consideration them. In an essay titled “Myth Became Fact”, he notes the impossibility of feeling an emotion corresponding to pleasure and concurrently studying it. But when you aren’t roaring with laughter, how are you going to genuinely understand humour? If you might be affected by toothache, you will likely be unable to write down. But once the toothache has subsided, how could you write a book about pain?

Lewis explains this paradox using the parable of Orpheus and Eurydice. Orpheus was permitted to guide his beloved wife out of the underworld, however the moment he looks back at her, she disappears. We can draw an abstract truth from this story in regards to the impossibility of concurrently seeing and experiencing, nevertheless it isn’t the one truth that this myth can communicate. If it were, it could be an allegory.

AS SUCH, an allegory is sort of a puzzle that have to be solved by the reader to disclose its hidden meaning. Its one-dimensional characters straightforwardly signal the qualities they represent, as in Bunyan’s Mr Despondency, held captive in Doubting Castle by a large called Despair.

Unlike allegory, myths are stories from which quite a few truths could also be abstracted. Instead of presenting the reader with a single message needing to be unlocked, myths instil a way of eager for something much less tangible — “like a flower whose smell reminds you of something you’ll be able to’t quite place”.

Like a lot of his critics, Lewis considered allegory to be a limited medium, since authors can only insert ideas that they already know, whereas a myth is of the next order, since authors can fill it with ideas of which they aren’t yet conscious.

AN ENCOUNTER with ancient myth was considered one of the important thing moments in Lewis’s introduction to the concept of “joy”. As a young man he got here across the next lines in Longfellow’s poem “Tegner’s Drapa”, lamenting the death of the Norse god Balder: “I heard a voice that cried, Balder the attractive Is dead, is dead” (lines 1-3).

Although he knew nothing of who Balder was at the moment, it provoked in him an intense desire for something that he couldn’t describe or name.

As he got here to know more in regards to the Norse mythology, he was deeply interested in its stories, in addition to those told by the Greeks, Celts, and Egyptians. But this created an issue for him when it got here to accepting the claims of the Christian religion, since he considered it to be just one other myth, with its story of a dying and rising god, no different from any of the others. Why should he embrace its claims over theirs?

IT WAS a late-night conversation along with his friends Hugo Dyson and J. R. R. Tolkien within the grounds of Magdalen College that helped Lewis to search out a solution to this query. What he got here to grasp is that, when he encountered a god dying and being revived in pagan myths, he found it profoundly moving, suggestive of meanings beyond his grasp. But, when he met the same concept within the Christian Gospels, he was unmoved.

What he took from his talk with Tolkien and Dyson was an openness to accepting the Christian story as a myth, with all its mystery and suggestive implications, but with one key difference from the Norse, Egyptian, and Classical myths: it really happened. But, by becoming fact, he argued, Christianity didn’t stop to be a myth: “That is the miracle.”

Reflection Read 2 Peter 1.16: “For we didn’t follow cleverly devised myths once we made known to you the facility and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we had been eyewitnesses of his majesty.”

How do Peter’s words challenge Tolkien and Lewis’s understanding of myth?

Professor Simon Horobin is Fellow and Tutor in English at Magdalen College, Oxford, holding the position that C. S. Lewis held at the school, and has lectured and published widely on C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien. His latest book is C. S. Lewis’s Oxford (Bodleian Publishing) (Books, 24 June 2024).

This is an extract from Wardrobes and Rings: Through Lenten lands with the Inklings, published by Canterbury Press at £12.99 (Church Times Bookshop £10.39); 978-1-78622-690-7.