The "pure joy" of "The Chronicles of Narnia"

There are many fine books on the life and work of C. S. Lewis, and I won't pretend that I've read even a small percentage of them (okay, a very small percentage). One of the best I've read is Narnia and Beyond: A Guide to the Fiction of C. S. Lewis (Ignatius Press, 1987, 2006), by Dr. Thomas Howard, who has written about Lewis for decades and even met him briefly back in the early 1960s, not long before Lewis died. Here is the preface to that book:

  C. S. Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia began appearing in the United States in the early 1950s. They made a stir then; but presently the stir became an insistent sound, which itself became eventually a roar, so to speak. By the time of this writing, two, or perhaps three, generations of children have been regaled by these "fairy tales" (as Lewis called them). And indeed they are fairy tales, in the best tradition of that genre. Everything is here: spells; talking animals; fauns; centaurs; unicorns (or at least a unicorn); witches; dryads; heroes; and, best of all, a lion who turns out to be the Son of the Emperor Beyond the Sea.

There is an irony in all of this, however. The thing is, what we find extolled in the Chronicles are such odd qualities as purity, humility, fidelity, valor, courtesy, domesticity, simplicity, and holiness, forsooth. This is all very well, but the point is that virtually every one of these qualities has long since been buried and forgotten in the avalanche which has swept over Western civilization in the last fifty years. The boulders and rubble in this avalanche have such names as "self-authentication", "self-actualization", "self-assertion", and "self-promotion", and with all of this comes a certain harshness, callousness, cynicism, and a thing which calls itself liberation, which is as old as mankind itself, namely the indulgence in ribald forms of public sexual license which would make Babylon itself blush.

But this is to strike an unhappy note. The Chronicles are full of pure joy. Glorious, hilarious, rhapsodic joy. To be sure, there is sorrow, and terror and wistfulness and horrible evil. But Lewis is like Dante: he knew that joy is a higher and deeper word than sorrow. He knew that joy is the Last Word. The Chronicles of Narnia are a "comedy" in the old sense of that word. It does not mean lots of laughs. Rather, it refers to a tale that ends in marriage, whatever ordeals may have gone before. Readers already versed in the Chronicles may object here that there is no marriage in Narnia. No. Not as such, of course. But that great rush at the end, when jewel the Unicorn leads them all in a great race "farther up and farther in", is akin to the glorious consummation of all things which we find in Dante, and, before that, in Christian revelation itself. It is the ingathering of all of God's people into his kingdom, the way a bride is brought into the household of her lord or, in this case, the way all of the good creatures in Narnia are swept up into Asian's country.

The interest in Narnia seems, suddenly, to have exploded in our decade. This may be due, in part, to the worldwide fascination with Tolkien's saga. And it makes sense: Lewis and Tolkien wrote about, and loved, the same world, and they read their manuscripts to each other over the years when they were working on them. We can only hope that the lovely, and even salvific, effects of their tales may keep alive in those who love these stories, something of the sheer goodness that obtains in Middle Earth and in Narnia.

• A short bio of Thomas Howard
• Thomas Howard books published by Ignatius Press
• Interviews and book excerpts
• C. S. Lewis resource page at Ignatius Insight

Comments

[SDG]

Once again, wholehearted endorsement of Howard's Narnia and Beyond. Peter Kreeft writes in the Foreword: "At last! A book about C.S. Lewis that doesn't sound like a term paper, a book that is a joy to read, a book written with Lewis's own passionate power with words … without question the best book yet written about the works of C. S. Lewis."

[Carl Olson]

Thanks, Steve! And I didn't even send a check yet. ;-)

[SDG]

Heh. My enthusiasm for Howard runs deep. I've met him a few times, corresponded with him and spoken to him on the phone. He's a treasure.