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Publié par	The Kent State University Press
Date de parution	06 décembre 2022
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781631015038
Langue	English

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The Lion’s Country
The Lion’s Country
C. S. Lewis’s Theory of the Real

Charlie W. Starr
The Kent State University Press Kent, Ohio
© 2022 by The Kent State University Press, Kent, Ohio 44242
All rights reserved
ISBN 978-1-60635-453-7
Manufactured in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced, in any manner whatsoever, without written permission from the Publisher, except in the case of short quotations in critical reviews or articles.
Cataloging information for this title is available at the Library of Congress.
26  25  24  23  22 5  4  3  2  1
To Bryan and Kathy Rife, the most real people I know
Contents
Foreword by Diana Pavlac Glyer
Preface
Acknowledgments
  1 The Truest Philosophy
  2 Reality and Desire
  3 Encountering the Real through Experience and Imagination
  4 The Apologetical Decade
  5 Mystery and the Real
  6 Hierarchy Part One
  7 Hierarchy Part Two
  8 Transposition
  9 Sacrament and the Problem of Knowing
10 Lewis’s Vision of Heaven
Appendix
Works Cited
Index
Foreword
Diana Pavlac Glyer
Think back to a recent time when you connected with a good friend, maybe over coffee or lunch, a time when you met together to talk and laugh and share. That real event really happened. And now, thinking back, you remember specific details: you recall the truth , if you will. Tom was wearing a blue shirt. There was a berry pie. The weather was cold.
Add to that memory a few more layers: How did you feel about that meeting? How do you evaluate the importance of it? What insights and possibilities did it hold?
Reality: It happened. Truth: An accurate account of that reality. Interpretation: How we wrestle to make sense of it. Philosophers delight to consider such definitions and distinctions. C. S. Lewis received a “first” in both classics and philosophy in 1922, and he became a philosophy tutor at University College, Oxford, in 1924. By the end of his first year, though, Lewis questioned his calling. In a letter to his father, he concludes, “I have not the brain and nerves for a life of pure philosophy. A continued search among the abstract roots of things, a perpetual questioning of all that plain men take for granted … is this the best life for temperaments such as ours?” ( Collected Letters 1: 648–49). Lewis shifted to the study of literary history and criticism, and he spent the remainder of his career as a teacher of English literature.
Although he changed his academic affiliation, he never abandoned the habits of mind he learned under the tutelage of William Kirkpatrick and throughout the years of his undergraduate education. This is evident throughout his writings, for many of Lewis’s most important contributions address life’s great questions in philosophical terms. The Abolition of Man is one important example. His essay “Myth Became Fact” is another. We find this approach again in The Problem of Pain, Miracles: A Preliminary Study , and Mere Christianity .
But, as Charlie Starr observes, it doesn’t stop there. Both Till We Have Faces and A Grief Observed can be understood as a reflection on the way that perception shapes our reality. The Great Divorce demonstrates that we must be willing to accommodate ourselves to reality (and not the other way around). Letters to Malcolm declares that God must, in mercy, shatter our ideas of him in order that we might know reality. Once you go looking for it, you see it everywhere.
Even the most accessible of Lewis’s works, The Chronicles of Narnia , contains significant insights gained through the lens of philosophical inquiry. Starr points out that The Silver Chair is fundamentally a book about knowledge. He writes, “how can we know? How can we be sure? Ultimately what it’s asking, though, is what is real?” ( page 48 ). And Lewis raises that same question yet again in The Last Battle by presenting the dwarves who are sitting in heaven but see only a stable; they’re surrounded by brilliant light but see nothing but darkness; they’re given a banquet of the finest foods but taste only hay and old vegetables ( page 50 ). Their stubborn presuppositions blind them to what is really real.
What is real? What are the essential distinctions between reality, fact, and truth? Is the immediate more real than the transcendent? Is the visible more real than the invisible? For those who do not naturally gravitate toward these kinds of questions, it all might seem to be merely a matter of picky semantics.
And yet, even if we are not inclined to devote our best attention to the pursuit of philosophical questions, I would argue that we have a lot to gain from those who have. It can do us a world of good to read authors like Charlie Starr in order to have our thinking process clarified, our foggy notions brushed away, and our vague understanding replaced with greater insight and precision. While it is right to celebrate Lewis’s creative accomplishment and enjoy his original approach to eternal issues, there are also a number ways he can clear the cobwebs and challenge not only what we think, but how . That is the beauty of this book. The Lion’s Country clearly delineates one of Lewis’s most important contributions—how he thinks about the essence of reality itself—and then traces this idea through his books, sermons, and essays.
Even more, those of us who love the works of C. S. Lewis have a lot to gain from this thoughtful, extended treatment of how certain key ideas—terms such as fact, reality, myth, transcendence, meaning, beauty, joy, the numinous, and the absolute—function throughout the writing of C. S. Lewis. Lewis is a joy to read and a pleasure to study. But at times, even the most seasoned Lewis scholars head off in the wrong direction because they have used the everyday definition of a word rather than the technical definition that Lewis is employing.
It is Lewis’s great friend J. R. R. Tolkien who illuminates the reason this is of such great value to both the fan and the scholar: “The chief purpose of life for any of us,” Tolkien says in a letter, “is to increase according to our capacity our knowledge of God by all means we have, and to be moved by it to praise and thanks” (May 20, 1969).
Good philosophy, and good books like this one, counter the insidious poison of bad philosophy. Teach us to practice better habits of mind. Show us how to interact more faithfully with the world God made. And help us to read C. S. Lewis with greater understanding, precision, and pleasure. Even more, pondering the nature of reality has the power to inch us even closer to the One who is not only the Way and the Life but the Truth. And, moved by it, to lift our hearts in praise and thanks.
Preface
There is some irony in my saying this book is for people who have a passion for truth because, ultimately, it’s not a book about truth. In fact, like me, you may be surprised to learn that C. S. Lewis, widely known as an apologist and champion of what he called “mere” Christianity, was not primarily interested in Truth . He was after something more. In his writings (some forty books, hundreds of essays and poems, and thousands of letters), Lewis shows a remarkable ability to stop you in your tracks and change the trajectory of your thoughts, even the way you think, forever. The direction-changing sentence I once encountered is in Lewis’s essay, “Myth Became Fact.” While talking about the complexities of knowledge and myth, Lewis makes this distinction: “truth is always about something, but reality is that about which truth is” (“Myth Became Fact” 66). I learned from Lewis that here was an epistemological tool—a tool about the nature of knowing and how it works—a tool that was absent from my education and was absent during the Modernist period in which Lewis wrote. It is simply that there is a distinction between fact (or reality) and truth.
The loss of this distinction can be traced easily enough, beginning with the rise of the concept of the undeniable, individual, utterly knowable fact , a concept that emerged slowly but early in the scientific revolution in Christian Europe (see Donald Cowan’s Unbinding Prometheus ). Where the great thinkers of the West had looked to a wholistic understanding of nature, relying on thought models of what they supposed nature to be like, understanding the limits of their pursuit of knowledge, the rise of the idea of the atomistic fact drove thought about truth from a sense of the whole to individual parts, and from a belief in accurate models to a belief in absolute knowledge. 1 Thus, Galileo got himself in trouble with the church, not for any anti-Christian claims in his science, but for believing that the Copernican model of the universe wasn’t merely a model but was absolute fact. Then, after the Age of Reason elevated one kind of knowing to supremacy, casting doubt on even the legitimacy of other (say poetic) modes of knowing (despite the Romantics’ best attempts to stem the tide), philosophy embraced the increasing influence of science, narrowing the scope of what is epistemologically acceptable even more, so that by the time C. S. Lewis entered college and then became a teacher in philosophy and Medieval and Renaissance literature in the 1920s, logical positivism has risen to claim that the only legitimate knowledge at all is the knowledge of facts—a knowledge that exists without the need for subjective interpretation, a knowledge that is wholly objective, and a knowledge that is utterly inarguable. In other words, by the early twentieth century, the only truth in existence was fact, fact the only truth, and the only distinction that needed to be made in human knowing was that between fact and opinion . 2
C. S. Lewis rejected this myopic view of knowledge even before he became a Christian. While his total epistemology is complex, Lewis generally writes of truth as an abstraction (there are some exceptions that we’ll get to), a step back from reality (the wo