Longing for Aslan’s Country: Christian Life According to C.S. Lewis
CrossWay Community Church
October 29th 2023
Note: The audio quality is poor for the first 14:48 minutes. However, after that point, it returns to normal quality.
C.S. Lewis held to many of the scientific conclusions of his day. Nonetheless, he was often critical of what others have sometimes called “scientism”—a worldview that treats science as a stand-alone teller of truth without a deeper epistemological basis and thus room for a metaphysics; a form of science that makes absolutist exclusive claims that lead it to assume more jurisdiction than its methodological parameters actually allow.
See the following quote from his lecture, “Is Theology Poetry?” or as we might rephrase it, Is Christianity nothing more than aesthetically pleasing mythology?
“The picture so often painted of Christians huddling together on an ever narrower strip of beach while the incoming tide of ‘Science’ mounts higher and higher corresponds to nothing in my own experience. That grand myth … is not for me a hostile novelty breaking in on my traditional beliefs. On the contrary, that cosmology is what I started from. Deepening distrust and final abandonment of it long preceded my conversion to Christianity. Long before I believed Theology to be true I had already decided that the popular scientific picture at any rate was false. One absolutely central inconsistency ruins it….
The whole picture professes to depend on inferences from observed facts. Unless inference is valid, the whole picture disappears. Unless we can be sure that reality in the remotest nebula or the remotest part obeys the thought laws of the human scientist here and now in his laboratory — in other words, unless Reason is an absolute — all is in ruins. Yet those who ask me to believe this world picture also ask me to believe that Reason is simply the unforeseen and unintended by-product of mindless matter at one stage of its endless and aimless becoming.
Here is flat contradiction. They ask me at the same moment to accept a conclusion and to discredit the only testimony on which that conclusion can be based. The difficulty is to me a fatal one; and the fact that when you put it to many scientists, far from having an answer, they seem not even to understand what the difficulty is, assures me that I have not found a mare’s nest but detected a radical disease in their whole mode of thought from the very beginning. The man who has once understood the situation is compelled henceforth to regard the scientific cosmology as being, in principle, a myth; though no doubt a great many true particulars have been worked into it.
Continue reading“My Dear Wormwood,
You mentioned casually in your last letter that the patient has continued to attend one church, and one only, since he was converted, and that he is not wholly pleased with it. May I ask what you are about? Why have I no report on the causes of his fidelity to the parish church? Do you realize that unless it is due to indifference it is a very bad thing? Surely you know that if a man can’t be cured of churchgoing, the next best thing is to send him all over the neighborhood looking for the church that ‘suits’ him until he becomes a taster or connoisseur of churches.
The reasons are obvious. In the first place the parochial organization should always be attacked, because, being a unity of place and not of likings, it brings people of different classes and psychology together in the kind of unity the Enemy [God] desires. The congregational principle, on the other hand, makes each church into a kind of club, and finally, if all goes well, into a coterie or faction.
In the second place, the search for a ‘suitable’ church makes the man a critic where the Enemy wants him to be a pupil. What He wants of the layman in church is an attitude which may, indeed, be critical in the sense of rejecting what is false or unhelpful, but which is wholly uncritical in the sense that it does not appraise—does not waste time in thinking about what it rejects, but lays itself open in non-commenting, humble receptivity to any nourishment that is going on. (You see how grovelling, how unspiritual, how irredeemably vulgar He is!) This attitude, especially during sermons, creates the condition (most hostile to our whole policy) in which platitudes can become really audible to a human soul. There is hardly any sermon, or any book, which may not be dangerous to us if it is received in this temper. So pray bestir yourself and send this fool the round of the neighboring churches as soon as possible. Your record up to date has not given us much satisfaction.
…
Your affectionate uncle,
Screwtape”
—C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
C.S. Lewis’ Prince Caspian (New York: Scholastic Inc., 1979) tells the story of a young Prince Caspian who must win back his kingdom against his evil Telmarine uncle, Miraz.
Early on in his ventures, one of Caspian’s comrades, a dwarf named Nikabrik, hints at his true colors (p. 77):
“Do you believe in Aslan?” said Caspian to Nikabrik.
“I’ll believe in anyone or anything,” said Nikabrik, “that’ll batter these cursed Telmarine barbarians to pieces or drive them out of Narnia. Anyone or anything, Aslan or the White Witch, do you understand?”
Finding themselves in dire straights, Caspian blows Susan’s magical horn in expectation that it will summon help, either of Aslan himself or the Pevensie children, Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy (pp. 95–96).
But Nikabrik eventually grows impatient (pp. 163–144):
”Whether it was that the Horn was blown too late, or whether there was no magic in it, no help has come. You, you great clerk, you master magician, you know-all; are you still asking us to hang our hopes on Aslan and King Peter and all the rest of it?” …
“The help will come,” said Trufflehunter. “I stand by Aslan. Have patience, like us beasts. The help will come. It may be even now at the door.”
“Pah!” snarled Nikabrik. “You badgers would have us wait till the sky falls and we can all catch larks. I tell you we can’t wait. Food is running short; we lose more than we can afford at every encounter; our followers are slipping away.”
Nikibrik proposes an alternative, wanting to take matters in his own hands (pp. 166–168):
“Well, Nikabrik, ” [Prince Caspian] said, “we will hear your plan.” …
“All said and done,” he [Nikabrik] muttered, “none of us knows the truth about the ancient days in Narnia. Trumpkin believed none of the stories. I was ready to put them to the trial. We tried first the Horn and it has failed. If there ever was a High King Peter and a Queen Susan and a King Edmund and a Queen Lucy, then either they have not heard us, or they cannot come, or they are our enemies—”
“Or they are on the way,” put in Trufflehunter.
“You can go on saying that till Miraz has fed us all to his dogs. As I was saying, we have tried one link in the chain of old legends, and it has done us no good. Well. But when your sword breaks, you draw your dagger. The stories tell of other powers beside the ancient Kings and Queens. How if we could call them up?” ….
“Who do you mean?” said Caspian at last.
“I mean a power so much greater than Aslan’s that it held Narnia spellbound for years and years, if the stories are true.”
“The White Witch!” cried three voices all at once….
“Yes, said Nikabrik very slowly and distinctly, “I mean the Witch. … We want power: and we want a power that will be on our side. … They say she ruled for a hundred years: a hundred years of winter. There’s power, if you like. There’s something practical.”
As I read the above section from C.S. Lewis’ Prince Caspian this evening, I couldn’t help but think of how it unfortunately seemed to parabolize much of the current posture of contemporary, American evangelicalism. We’re pragmatic over principled. Over against the “foolish” call to cruciformly, we’re entangled in a love affair with the corrupting influence of power. We want power—who cares if that power happens to be the “White Witch”?
Luckily, Prince Caspian and crew have the wherewithal to see through Nikabrik’s proposal, and they dismantle his plot right then and there. May we have the foresight in this moment to revive our call and do the same.
I’ve been listening through the Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis. I thought I’d share the location of the audio for anyone else who’s interested. You can find the full series here.
Kirk E. Miller 