There’s a wonderful scene in The Magician’s Nephew, the first book in the Chronicles of Narnia where Uncle Andrew, the amateur and rather iniquitous magician whose petty dabblings in magic open the first door to Narnia, meets Aslan, the Lord of Narnia, the central hero of the books, and the Mighty Lion who so often serves as a literary vehicle for C. S. Lewis’ musings about the nature, character and life of God.
Earlier on in the book, Uncle Andrew watches the Lion Aslan sing the world of Narnia into creation, but because of his fear, his pride and his iniquity, he is unable to bring himself to believe that the lion is in fact singing: “And the longer and more beautiful the Lion sang, the harder Uncle Andrew tried to make himself believe that he could hear nothing but roaring.”
“The trouble,” Lewis wisely and somewhat playfully writes, “with making yourself stupider than you really are, is that you very often succeed.” Soon, Andrew’s willful unbelief has flowered into full-blown obtuseness, and he is unable to hear the Lion’s song, or, indeed, any of the speech of any of the talking animals in Narnia. To him, their laughter, discourse, singing and jesting is nothing more than so much barkings, growling, bayings and howlings.
And so, when he finally comes face to face with Aslan, towards the end of the book, and a little girl named Polly asks Aslan if he can’t do something to help poor Uncle Andrew, Aslan compassionately, but clearly says no. “I cannot [explain Narnia] to this old sinner, and I cannot comfort him either; he has made himself unable to hear my voice. If I spoke to him, he would hear only growlings and roarings. Oh Adam's sons, how cleverly you defend yourselves against all that might do you good!"
This is an idea C. S. Lewis plays with frequently in his writings, that we humans excel especially at plugging our ears to the reality of God; and that, the harder we try to convince ourselves that there is nothing more to life than what we can see and hear and measure and touch, the harder we make it to actually hear from God at all; and that there is a point beyond which we can have convinced ourselves so thoroughly that God’s singing is really just the natural growling and grumblings of nature, that there’s no going back.
The idea pops up again in The Last Battle. A group of Dwarves are determined not to be “taken in” by stories of a great powerful Lion in control of the world. They have been flung into the donkey stable (it’s a long story, but in the logic of the novels, they have essentially “died” in there, and crossed over to the after-life). But even though the children can all see that they are now surrounded by a beautiful, verdant, sun-lit paradise, the dwarves obstinately insist that they are still in the stable.
Lucy asks Aslan if he will do anything to help them...
"Dearest," said Aslan, "I will show you both what I can, and what I cannot, do." He came close to the Dwarfs and gave a low growl: low, but it set all the air shaking. But the Dwarfs said to one another, "Hear that? That's the gang at the other end of the stable. Trying to frighten us. They do it with a machine of some kind. Don't take any notice. They won't take us in again!"
Aslan raised his head and shook his mane. Instantly a glorious feast appeared on the Dwarfs' knees: pies and tongues and pigeons and trifles and ices, and each Dwarf had a goblet of good wine in his right hand. But it wasn't much use. They began eating and drinking greedily enough, but it was clear that they couldn't taste it properly. They thought they were eating and drinking only the sort of things you might find in a stable. One said he was trying to eat hay and another said he had a bit of an old turnip and a third said he'd found a raw cabbage leaf. And they raised golden goblets of rich red wine to their lips and said "Ugh! Fancy drinking dirty water out of a trough that a donkey's been at! Never thought we'd come to this." But very soon every Dwarf began suspecting that every other Dwarf had found something nicer than he had, and they started grabbing and snatching, and went on to quarrelling, till in a few minutes there was a free fight and all the good food was smeared on their faces and clothes or trodden under foot. But when at last they sat down to nurse their black eyes and their bleeding noses, they all said:
"Well, at any rate there's no Humbug here. We haven't let anyone take us in. The Dwarfs are for the Dwarfs."
"You see, " said Aslan. "They will not let us help them. They have chosen cunning instead of belief. Their prison is only in their own minds, yet they are in that prison; and so afraid of being taken in that they cannot be taken out."In his Screwtape Letters, he takes this idea one step further. In letter 30, Screwtape advises the young tempter Wormwood that special damage can be done to his “patient’s” faith if he can get him to believe that the horror, despair, fear and grief he feels in moments of crisis, despondency, threat or loss, are “real life,” but the joy, attachment, hope and exaltation he feels in moments of delight, intimacy, courage or worship, are only “subjective emotion,” and not real.
The general rule which we have now pretty well established among them is that in all experiences which can make them happier or better only the physical facts are “Real” while the spiritual elements are “subjective”; in all experiences which can discourage or corrupt them the spiritual elements are the main reality and to ignore them is to be an escapist. Thus in birth the blood and pain are “real”, the rejoicing a mere subjective point of view; in death, the terror and ugliness reveal what death “really means”. The hatefulness of a hated person is “real”—in hatred you see men as they are, you are disillusioned; but the loveliness of a loved person is merely a subjective haze concealing a “real” core of sexual appetite or economic association. Wars and poverty are “really” horrible; peace and plenty are mere physical facts about which men happen to have certain sentiments.There is a profound insight into the psychology of faith, I think, in this observation that we tend to experience the world as we convince ourselves it is, and this is especially true in the spiritual life. It is possible to be so afraid of being "taken in," as Aslan says, that we cannot be taken out of the blind, closed, spiritually dead prison of our own making. Like Gerard Manley Hopkins put it, the World is charged with the grandeur of God, and if, like Uncle Andrew, we grow too adept at making ourselves dull to it, we are liable to lose the ability to enjoy it at all.
0 comments:
Post a Comment