I Met Reality While Riding on a Lion
What is reality?
That is a question we used to take for granted outside of teenage bonfire conversations late at night or undergraduate philosophy classes. Now it is a normal thing for people to express significant doubt that what we experience is real.
We all experience reality differently. Our bodies sense things in unique ways. Experiences form us to perceive light, walls, and knives in particular ways.
It’s good to recognize the subjectivity of our perception of reality, but the existence of objective reality is a different level of concern.
In The Lion’s Country: C. S. Lewis’s Theory of the Real, Charlie Starr wades into deep water with Narnia’s creator. His book helps uncover a unified theme in Lewis’s work, pointing toward the objective moral order of the universe. The book provides some concrete forms for daunting, abstract questions.
Starr serves as associate professor of English at Alderson Broaddus University. He is a recognized expert on the handwriting of J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, consulting on newly discovered manuscripts to validate authenticity. His previous book, The Faun’s Bookshelf, was an intriguing exploration of story and imagination in the work of C. S. Lewis.
The Lion’s Country tackles a heady topic, but C. S. Lewis proves to be a helpful guide. Starr ensures readers come away with a better understanding of what Lewis’s view of reality, and a better view of reality itself.
The Challenge of Terminology
As the proverb states, it does little good to ask a fish to explain water.
In the same way, it is difficult for humans to explain reality.
As the kids say, it’s way too meta.
But we have to have some way of talking about the world as we experience it and as it is. The conversation may be difficult, but it is important.
C. S. Lewis begins with the terms, reality and fact. As Starr notes, these are roughly synonymous terms and are used consistently through much of Lewis’s corpus. He also uses terms like history, myth, and nature. However, these tend to be occasional in their use, more affected by the context in which Lewis uses them, and less universal in scope.
Lewis believed objective reality exists. There is something very solid about reality. In The Great Divorce he depicts heavenly reality as being hard and more solid than anything experienced before. The ghosts who took that imaginative bus ride from Hell to visit heaven couldn’t bear to touch the grass in heaven. It cut them like diamonds.
Imaginative worlds helped Lewis explore reality. Fantasy and science fiction are powerful tools for exploring reality because they force us to step outside of it. A fish might understand water if he became a man for a day.
For many of us it takes a trip to Narnia or an encounter with aliens to finally begin to understand reality.
Lewis the Christian Platonist
C. S. Lewis was a Christian Platonist. That is, he believed that Plato was really onto something with his allegory of the cave and his understanding of the World of Forms.
Some may be skeptical of the connection between an ancient Greek philosophy and Christianity. After all, Christians have been asking what Athens has to do with Jerusalem for years.
But Lewis’s Christian Platonism reflected his immersion in medieval sources. He claimed to be a dinosaur, so rooted in the literature of the Middle Ages that he did not fit in his own time. This is largely why Lewis remains so popular among contemporary Christians: His very up to date writing disrupts our contemporary understanding with an older, alien worldview.
Understanding Lewis as Platonist is key to recognizing what he does in his works. Once you see it, you can’t help but see it more.
Lewis reveals his Christian Platonism is in The Silver Chair when the Green Lady is attempting to reenchant them because Prince Rilian had destroyed the enchanted throne. As the mind-dulling fumes of the fire overcome the adventurers, the witch tells them that the sun, lions, and all that they remember from Narnia (reality) are just imaginary projections of smaller things like lamps and house cats.
Though most do not recognize it, readers are encountering a version of Plato’s allegory of the cave. The enchantress is trying to convince them—with the help of magic—that the shadows were real and what they had seen when outside the cave (in this case, before entering the underworld) was just a dream. But Puddleglum declares it would be better to be babies playing a game and believe in the sun and lions than to be people whose best hope of reality was lamps and house cats.
Once you read that section of Plato’s Republic and that chapter of The Silver Chair, you won’t doubt the connection.
After that, Professor Kirk’s comments in The Last Battle make a great deal more sense, when he says, “It’s all in Plato, all in Plato.”
And then the close of Narnia itself, with the discovery of a new, greater more real Narnia when the old world had passed away. That is the World of Forms being opened to mortal occupancy.
It’s not that Lewis presses Plato’s philosophy onto reality over the Bible, but that Lewis (and others) think that Plato had, through common grace, come to a partial understanding of what the Bible describes.
In any case, understanding Lewis’s Christian Platonism is critical to seeing his vision of reality, as Starr makes clear.
Following the Lion
The allegory of the cave becomes a way of understanding much of our lives. Our epistemology, reality, why Christians ought to be countercultural.
Christians have met the Lion. They have seen the Sun. We have gotten a foretaste of the new heavens and the new earth through our encounter with the risen Savior and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit.
When we get grasp that vision, it only makes sense to follow the Lion further up and further in. We are chasing him out of the cave of shadows into the light of ultimate reality, which will be firmer, crisper, truer and in every way better than what we are experiencing now.
Starr closes his book with a compelling reminder:
“If God is the most real thing there is, and if God is Infinite, without limits, then heaven for us will be an eternal encounter with that which will become more and more real to us throughout our eternal lives. The pursuit of God is nothing less than this: the greatest, most complete pursuit of Reality, the only one that can somehow become yet ‘Greatest-er,’ the only on that, upon completion, will never end.
Further up, and further in.”
The way we talk about humans also has moral implications, which are more significant than how we treat our pets. In his 2011 book, Less than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others, David Livingstone Smith explores how language changes culture and leads to the justification of extreme violence against others, especially when they become perceived as less than human.