Further Up and Further In

C. S. Lewis wrote the Narnia books for children, but with a richness of imagination and a depth of psychological and spiritual insight that merit serious attention by adults. A recent conversation about the challenges of transitioning from childhood beliefs about Santa Claus (and more generally from childhood) drove me back to them. For Christian parents, there is the worry that a child’s disillusionment about one Christmas story will undermine faith in another and far more important Christmas story. It’s a danger Lewis is aware of – the temptation to adopt a “sophisticated” adult perspective, which is determined not to “taken in”, “sees through” everything and as a result sees nothing. Ultimately, Lewis shows this is a particularly nasty form of damnation (“the dwarfs are for the dwarfs”). Lewis shows us children who embrace the false sophistication of worldly “knowing” (Edmund and Eustace before their conversions; and Susan, who has known the reality of Narnia, but turns away from it), but there are also children who leave the world of Narnia with reluctance.

At the end of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader Aslan tells Edmund and Lucy that they will “never” return to Narnia, as they are now too old. The children are dismayed, above all at the prospect of losing Aslan; but he assures them they shall meet him in their own world (England) also: “But there I have another name. You must learn to know me by that name. This was the very reason why you were brought into Narnia, that by knowing me here for a little, you may know me better there”. The mode in which we know the reality of Christ changes, but not the reality itself. Though the images we knew in childhood must be recognized as images, the reality which we knew in the images abides still. In fact, the images themselves are means by which we come to recognize the reality in the mode of adult reason. This is emphatically not a transition from religious illusion to atheist reality (the position refuted in The Silver Chair).

This transition from image to reality is not confined to the transition from childhood to adolescence: it is the work of one’s entire life, a continual growing up to spiritual maturity in a deepening knowledge of spiritual reality. “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.” In The Last Battle, after the destruction of Narnia, the Narnians discover themselves in a new Narnia. “When Aslan said you could never go back to Narnia, he meant the Narnia you were thinking of. But that was not the real Narnia. That had a beginning and an end. It was only a shadow or copy of the real Narnia, which has always been here and always will be here: just as our own world, England and all, is only a shadow or copy of something in Aslan’s real world. You need not mourn over Narnia. All of the old Narnia that mattered, all the dear creatures, have been drawn into the real Narnia through the Door. And of course it is different; as different as a real thing is from a shadow or a waking life from a dream”. As the speaker (Digory) notes, “It’s all in Plato, all in Plato”. The challenge of growing up is not to exchange illusion for a kind of cynical “knowing-ness” (really just another illusion), but to move “further up and further in” into the reality that was first met in images. Our entire life is engaged in that journey “inwards and upwards”. “Unto thee, O Lord, will I lift up my soul” (Ps 25:1).

It is a theme addressed also by T. S. Eliot in The Cultivation of Christmas Trees. For the child, the poet says, “ / …the candle is a star, and the gilded angel / Spreading its wings at the summit of the tree / Is not only a decoration, but an angel”. The image and the reality are not distinguished, and so there is a possibility of disillusionment as we grow up, but the poet directs us in another path: “The child wonders at the Christmas Tree: / Let him continue in the spirit of wonder … / So that the glittering rapture, the amazement / Of the first-remembered Christmas Tree, / … the reverence and the gaiety / May not be forgotten in later experience, / In the bored habituation, the fatigue, the tedium, / The awareness of death, the consciousness of failure, / Or in the piety of the convert / Which may be tainted with a self-conceit / Displeasing to God and disrespectful to children ….” The purpose of cultivating the capacity to wonder is emphatically not to nurture sentimental nostalgia for childhood, but rather to advance through memory towards an adult experience of awe: “So that before the end, the eightieth Christmas / (By “eightieth” meaning whichever is last) / The accumulated memories of annual emotion / May be concentrated into a great joy / Which shall be also a great fear, as on the occasion / When fear came upon every soul: / Because the beginning shall remind us of the end / And the first coming of the second coming”. “Not in that poor lowly stable, / with the oxen standing by, / we shall see Him, but in heaven, / set at God’s right hand on high;/ when like stars His children crowned / all in white shall wait around”. “Further up and further in”.