Martindale Beyond the Shadowlands (Foreword by Walter Hooper)

C. S. Lewis on Heaven and Hell
1. Auflage 2007
ISBN: 978-1-4335-1709-9
Verlag: Crossway
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 240 Seiten

Those who know Lewis's work will enjoy Martindale's thorough examination of the powerful images of Heaven and Hell found in Lewis's fiction, and all readers can appreciate Martindale's scholarly yet accessible tone. Read this book, and you will see afresh the wonder of what lies beyond the Shadowlands.

 Wayne Martindale (PhD, University of California) is professor of English at Wheaton College in Wheaton, Illinois, where he regularly teaches classes on C. S. Lewis.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Martindale, Wayne

Leseproben

2

MAKING THE MYTHS OF
HEAVEN AND HELL

The Mythical Mode “can give us experiences we have never had and thus, instead of ‘commenting on life,’ can add to it.”1

C.S. LEWIS

Harry Blamires, a former pupil of Lewis and a considerable scholar, apologist, and author of fiction, remembers that Lewis’s friend “Owen Barfield once recommended to scholars the need for ‘unthinking.’”2 We need the same gift when attempting to think of Heaven. All of our present categories will lead us astray. We are limited by a very small amount of time and can sustain very few close relationships. We do not live our lives for very long at a time with our eternal destiny in view, though we are commanded to try and rewarded when we do. In helping us get outside the box, Blamires points out that when we look up caterpillar in the dictionary or encyclopedia, we find it described in terms of the butterfly: what it will be. He suggests imagining how an angel looking up our own species might find us described, since our own “metamorphosis” will be far more radical than the caterpillar’s: “I cannot help wondering what an angel would find if he looked up Man and Woman in the Encyclopaedia Caelestis”:3

The name given to the larvae of the saved in their prepupal stage as terrestrial beings. They are two-legged, two-armed, two-eyed, and two-eared (and the most degenerate specimens are said to be two-faced). They are wingless. They have only a rudimentary sensitivity to reality. They tend to measure everything wholly on the basis of their immature understanding as creatures imprisoned in the space-time continuum.4

But how do we “unthink” entrenched images and ideas, as Barfield suggests? The best way is to leave this world behind and go to a new one where we can start all over again without all the old assumptions and hang-ups. Where do we do that? In imaginative literature of the sort Lewis excelled at creating. And how do we, along with Blamires, think into our future? Again, through imaginative literature. The unique gift of good fiction is to appeal simultaneously to our intellects, imaginations, and emotions. It can deliver such an integrated experience that our mental landscapes are permanently altered.

This is one reason why Jesus always taught with stories. Indeed, much of the Bible is in narrative form. The advantage is in defying all the abstract categories that can foster legalistic applications. Almost any parable would serve to illustrate. As Colin Duriez so aptly puts it: “C. S. Lewis believed that heaven is probably unimaginable, even though we have the biblical images to take us as far as they can. Parable, allegory, and fiction are the closest that we can come to speaking of heaven. This is why he explored heaven so much through fantasy.”5 To put it another way, Lewis’s whole enterprise in helping his readers grasp biblical truth was a process of demythologizing the false and remythologizing the true.

Lewis loved myth from his earliest childhood, especially Norse. Myths of dying gods who sacrificed themselves for others powerfully captured his imagination. The action and emotion rang morally true, but he thought them “lies breathed through silver” until his friends Tolkien and Dyson explained on an extended walk around the Magdalen College grounds in the wee hours that the old myths were “a real though unfocused gleam of divine truth falling on human imagination.” As David Downing summarizes it:

They argued that one of the great and universal myths, that of the dying God who sacrifices himself for the people, shows an innate awareness of the need for redemption not by one’s own works, but as a gift from some higher realm. For them, the incarnation was the pivotal point at which myth became history. The life, death and resurrection of Christ not only fulfilled Old Testament types but also embodied—literally—central motifs found in all the world’s mythologies. . . . No more were his beloved Greek myths, Nordic sagas and Irish legends mere escapist tripe unworthy of a thinking person. They became reservoirs of trans-rational truths; they provided insights, admittedly partial and distorted, about realities beyond the reach of logical inquiry. In Christianity, the true myth to which all the others were pointing, Lewis found a world-view that he could defend as both good and real. It was a faith grounded in history and one that satisfied even his formidable intellect.

For Lewis, Christianity would thence become the fountainhead of all myths and tales of enchantment, the key to all mythologies, the myth that unfolded itself in history.6

Of course, using the term myth in the precincts of Christianity is understandably going to raise red flags and get the hackles up on some who have defended Christianity against the charges that it is “only a myth.” Before venturing further, the first thing to remind ourselves of is Lewis’s commitment to defending the truth of Christianity. No one was more convinced of it than he, and few have paid such a price without suffering physical torture and martyrdom. Against his nature as a bookish stay-at-home man, he traveled and spoke to diverse audiences. This resulted in a massive correspondence that obliged him to labor one to two hours each morning at a task he prayed to be delivered from but never was. Perhaps harder, he bore for nearly thirty years the scorn of many in the Oxford scholarly community, including his own college, who felt that he had violated the unwritten code of staying in your own academic field and not popularizing for the unlearned. Add to this the rampant disbelief of atheists and agnostics and the unavoidable jealousy in that very closed community.

The second thing, and more to the point, is getting down some definitions. Lewis uses the term myth in its two most common forms, plus a third specialized sense, much as he used the term joy in its ordinary sense of “happiness” and in the special sense of “longing and desire,” which confusingly means the lack of something versus its possession. Similarly, myth usually means either ancient stories formerly believed but now seen as fictions or something false, which only the ignorant or foolish would believe. This makes for tough sledding when the two are linked by a true believer like Lewis into an apparent oxymoron like “Christian myth.” In the third sense, as in “Christian myth,” Lewis means a story that embodies values, that gives us at once an imaginative experience and relates truths of the most important kind. In this meaning, it shares something with the first definition in that the myths embodied the beliefs and values of a culture. The importance for Lewis is clear from the opening account of his literary taste and conversion. The importance for those who may not share those tastes may not be obvious at first, but the effort of understanding it pays off because it explains why we love his fiction and why it has been so hugely successful.

In “Myth Became Fact,” Lewis observes a basic human problem that myth solves. Ordinarily, we cannot have an experience and think about the experience at the same time without fundamentally altering it. We can’t kiss a beloved and think about kissing without ruining the moment. We can’t laugh at a joke and discuss the principles of effective humor at the same time. In one case we are in an experience, and in the other outside it examining it. The unique contribution of mythic writing is in allowing us to have an experience while getting insight into elemental truth. Here is how Lewis puts it in his essay “Myth Became Fact”: “What flows into you from the myth is not truth but reality (truth is always about something, but reality is the about which truth is), and, therefore, every myth becomes the father of innumerable truths on the abstract level.”7We see this in the application of Jesus’ parables to innumerable life situations, which is why “he said nothing to them without a parable.”8 Fortunately, we can receive this benefit without understanding how myth works, but wanting to know how things work is part of being human, as well as a means of doing the thing ourselves. The mythic element in Lewis’s fiction is the very thing that has captivated millions with “wonder and delight.” His work, like few others, arouses our elemental longing for heavenly satisfactions and vibrates many other cords of authentic human experience.

Lewis cautions that we should not confuse mythic writing with artistic writing. Myth, in Lewis’s special sense, works because it is a certain kind of story and can be effective in literary writing, painting, or even dull prose. His fullest definition occurs in Experiment in Criticism in the chapter “On Myth,” where he lists six characteristics. Myths: are “extra-literary”; don’t depend on the usual storytelling techniques of suspense and surprise, and may in fact have a sense of the inevitable; don’t foster identification with the characters, though we feel “a profound relevance to our own life”; deal with the supernatural; are solemn; and raise a sense of awe attaching to characters or worlds unlike us (like angels, ghosts, or gods).9

Myth also involves what Lewis terms a “world picture” or understanding of value, meaning, and significance. Obviously, these can...