- To live like Lewis is to live a life of enchanted engagement with reality. Only in doing so can we chase away the pitfalls of modern living that lead to loneliness and gloom.
In the age of modernity, we find ourselves confronting a familiar affliction: bleakness. Our lives are marked by disillusionment. We doom-scroll, our eyes glazed over, while once useful dopamine receptors quietly shoot their last remaining endorphins. The YouTube rabbit hole is not so much an experience in enjoyment as much as it is a reflex of our current era. We watch videos of others cosplaying luxurious livelihoods all while sitting in a darkened room hoping for something more. And then what few icons we may look to as heroes the world often tells us are evil. To put it simply: in the era of algorithms and digital experiences we have become bored and uninspired.
The modern age has long been diagnosed as disenchanted. Max Weber famously spoke of the “disenchantment of the world” by which rationalization and secularization erode the magical and sacred dimensions of life. Jürgen Habermas extended this analysis, noting how modernity marginalizes religion from public reason, confining it to the private sphere thus stripping us of a shared moral tradition and language. Ernest Gellner added that industrial society, by its very logic, tends to suppress myth and tradition in favor of utilitarian norms. All three observed a flattening of experience — a world explained but no longer felt. However, C.S. Lewis, one of the greatest writers of the 20th century and a religious apologist, noted that disenchantment also led to modern cynicism.
The underlying thread across Lewis’s work is his recognition that we have become disenchanted and thus contemptuous in a world stripped of imaginative thinking. His response wasn’t withdrawal, but a call to see the world differently — to cultivate the childlike wonder that allows us to find meaning and beauty even in the mundane.
Lewis lays out this philosophy in the very first of the well-known The Screwtape Letters. The letters are the fictional correspondence between a senior devil, Screwtape, and his nephew in training, Wormwood. In the first letter, Screwtape tells Wormwood that the true tactic of the devil is not to argue against faith, but to simply instill a sense of boredom dressed up as sophistication. “Your business is to fix his attention on the stream,” Screwtape says. “Teach him to call it ‘real life’ and don’t let him ask what he means by ‘real’.”
Screwtape then tells the story of his previous “subject” – a man who was sitting in the British museum whose mind began to wander in the direction of something sublime. Instead of arguing against the feeling, Screwtape simply convinced him that it was time for lunch. In addition “[Screwtape] showed him a newsboy shouting the midday paper, and a No. 73 bus going past, and before he had gone very far [he had] an unalterable conviction that, whatever odd ideas might come into a man’s head when [shut] up alone with his books, a healthy dose of ‘real life’ (by which he meant the bus and the newsboy) was enough to show [that] all ‘that sort of thing’ just couldn’t be true.” Lewis tells us how Screwtape’s subject later became “fond of talking about ‘that inarticulate sense for actuality which is our ultimate safeguard against the aberrations of mere logic.’” For Lewis, the guard against a higher plane of thinking – or what Screwtape sarcastically refers to as “mere logic” – isn’t a clever argument but mundanity.
But according to Lewis, this loss of wonder in the age of the ordinary isn’t only a crisis of religion but a broader problem for all who seek to live a joyful life of meaning. Lewis saw this problem manifesting particularly in education, where he believed teachers were inadvertently crushing the very capacity for wonder they should be cultivating. In his essay critiquing the state of education in England – The Abolition of Man – Lewis writes that teachers who reinforce the death of imagination are doing a disservice to their students:
They have learned from tradition that youth is sentimental — and they conclude that the best thing they can do is to fortify the minds of young people against emotion. My own experience as a teacher tells an opposite tale. For every one pupil who needs to be guarded from a weak excess of sensibility there are three who need to be awakened from the slumber of cold vulgarity. The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts. The right defence against false sentiments is to inculcate just sentiments. By starving the sensibility of our pupils we only make them easier prey to the propagandist when he comes. For famished nature will be avenged and a hard heart is no infallible protection against a soft head.
To counter the “cold vulgarity” of the ordinary, Lewis teaches that the solution is to see the world as extraordinary. And for Lewis the key to recapturing the extraordinary is by unshackling ourselves from the cynicism so often born from adulthood.
This rejection of the pessimistic life is the leitmotif throughout Lewis’s fantasy magnum opus, The Chronicles of Narnia. Narnia is at first glance a routine work of child fiction. It tells the story of the four Pevensie children whisked away on the adventure of a lifetime complete with knights, witches, talking animals, and a miraculous lion named Aslan. However, it is clear that Lewis is not only telling a story but trying to impart a message about the role of childlike wonder. The subject of the stories in Narnia is the children. In fact, when a child becomes an adult they are no longer allowed to enter Narnia. Moreover, it is Lucy, the youngest of the children, who discovers Narnia – much to the skepticism of the more “advanced” older siblings. It is of no surprise then that in later books in the series it is Lucy, too, who has the strongest belief in Aslan in moments of doubt from others.
Lewis cryptically begins Narnia with this message as well. Writing to his goddaughter, Lucy Barfield, Lewis writes: “I wrote this story for you, but when I began it I had not realized that girls grow quicker than books. As a result you are already too old for fairy tales, and by the time it is printed and bound you will be older still. But some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.” The mysterious message is precisely the aim of Narnia: to recapture what adults tend to lose, the wonder of a child reading a fairy tale.
Every book in The Chronicles of Narnia reinforces this main theme. For example, the entire story of Prince Caspian, the second in the series, can be summed as a war between those who believe in the “old” legends and fairytales, and those who mock them.
Sometimes, Lewis puts this ideology directly into the mouths of his characters. In The Magician’s Nephew, after Narnia is created, Aslan elects a simple London cabdriver to be the first king. The narrator remarks that after having spent time in Narnia “their faces had a new expression, especially the King’s. All the sharpness and cunning and quarrelsomeness which he had picked up as a London cabby seemed to have been washed away, and the courage and kindness which he had always had were easier to see (p. 155).” In The Silver Chair, when the villainous Green Witch, Queen of Underland, tries to convince the heroes that “there is no Narnia, no Overworld, no sky, no sun, no Aslan,” the often-cynical Puddleglum replies: “I won’t deny any of what you said. But… suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things – trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself… Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one. And that’s the funny thing… We’re just babies making up a game, if you’re right. But four babies playing a game can make a play-world which licks your real world hollow (145).”
This is why for any reader of Narnia the role of mythic folklore stands out in every word. Lewis wanted to counter the cynicism endemic to modernity with wonder and awe. The fairy tale for Lewis was the sandbox for creating a world of enchantment.
Indeed, in his essay, On Stories, Lewis distinguishes between imagination and emotion, the former being the sole purpose of fiction. For this reason, the fairytale for Lewis has less to do with facts or belief but in exercising the mind in the marvelous:
Good stories often introduce the marvellous or supernatural, and nothing about Story has been so often misunderstood as this. Thus, for example, Dr. Johnson, if I remember rightly, thought that children liked stories of the marvellous because they were too ignorant to know that they were impossible. But children do not always like them, nor are those who like them always children; and to enjoy reading about fairies–much more about giants and dragons–it is not necessary to believe in them. Belief is at best irrelevant…
According to Lewis the emphasis on mythic storytelling is the sine qua non of fiction. As Lewis concludes, because “in real life, the idea of adventure fades when the day-to-day details begin to happen.”
This is not a prescription for escapism, nor is it a plea to ignorance; precisely the opposite. As Aslan tells Lucy at the end of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader “that by knowing me here [in Narnia] for a little, you may know me better [in the real world].” The purpose of wonder is not to escape but to confront reality with a sense of joy. This idea was very much patterned after Lewis’s own religious journey. After a religious upbringing Lewis left the fold in favor of pure rationalism. But after meeting and befriending another famed fiction writer, J.R.R. Tolkien, Lewis became “the most reluctant convert in all of England.” This suggests the idea that for Lewis conversion wasn’t a rejection of rational thinking but a realization that rationalism without wonder was insufficient. That is why in place of cynicism Lewis challenges his readers to recapture wonder in everyday life. He doesn’t mock critical thinking in favor of childishness but instead looks down on the accoutrements of adulthood we take on that so often blind us to life’s beauty that only childlike imagination can recall. To live like Lewis is to live a life of enchanted engagement with reality. Only in doing so can we chase away the pitfalls of modern living that lead to loneliness and gloom.
This article was originally published by RealClearBooks and made available via RealClearWire.
