A Letter to a Religious Friend

Dear Peter,

You told me that you were going to see the Narnia film and asked my thoughts about it.

Of course, I am not a professional film reviewer. I loved the movie, but then the books made such an impact on me as a child that it is safe to say that just the sight of Lucy meeting Tumnus (the faun in the woods) was going to put a smile on my face for the rest of the Holidays. You have not read the books so you are wondering who Tumnus is and if I have lost my mind. How does someone with a doctorate in philosophy from an analytic department end up raving about a modern fairy tale?

Oddly enough to the modern mind what the world needs now is a good fairy tale. Now sadly most people have been taught that “fairy tale” or the better word “myth” just means false stories people make up to explain things when they don’t have science. We both know (thank goodness) that this wrong. A myth, the way Plato or Lewis would use it, is a big story used to make sense out reality. It explains the facts as best it can. It is likely, but can never be known (for sure) to be true. In this sense, all of “big science” is a myth.

Of course, some myths are better than others. When not infected with secularist assumptions modern science is one of the best myths ever developed. It explains a great many facts and does so in a way that uncovers many other important things. However, modern the modern scientific myth has limited itself from exploring the personal and final causes in the cosmos. This is not the place to ask whether that is a good idea. That is the way it is at the moment, but this means science (despite the pretensions of some scientists) cannot explain a big chunk of reality. Amazingly it cannot explain the very bit of reality that must persons (since they are persons) find most interesting.

Personal causes exist. Narnia was written by a person and is not the product of chance. The work of C.S. Lewis or Shakespeare or Isaac Asimov for that matter cannot be reduced (so far as anyone knows) to the impersonal. No little atoms colliding with each other could produce the character of Aslan, Hamlet, or Mule. Narnia, like much of the best literature from Trollope to Tolstoy is partly an attempt to tell a story that explains (without explaining away) these personal facts. Why do people act as they do? What is meaning of sacrifice and of duty? What is honor? These are not questions the modern scientific story even attempts to answer. Narnia provides provisional answers to a few of these questions that is satisfying to both children and to adults.

Of course, this sort of myth-making, or fairy tale, has its limits. Lewis is not trying to explain how the cosmos goes, but he is telling a counter-factual story (an alternative cosmos) to illuminate who the personal agents in the cosmos go! Narnia is not anti-science (fairy tales versus science) as some silly reviewers might say, but an attempt (and only a rudimentary and partial one) to complete our modern view of reality. Dante could write both best science (of his day) and best poetry (dealing with the personal) at the same time. We have limited ourselves to doing one at a time (to our loss I think), but Lewis is trying to fill the gaps of our scientific education.

At the same time, you will notice how wholesome this is for education. Lewis is not placing fairy tales against reason or science. He is for science and for logic. He just not simple enough to believe that poetry is merely feelings-based while what we call science is merely factual. Both poetry and the most technical of scientific papers are parts of a whole description of the truth of the world. Our fairy tales must account for our science just as our science should account for the truths found in our fairy tales. Scientists who complain about ethical limits to their investigations have not learned the first lesson of what it is to be human . . . and so they repeat the mistake of the wizard in Aladdin and assume that knowledge or power is its own justification. At the same time, the typical Hollywood fairy tale (so unlike Narnia) wants us to follow only our hearts against our best reason. The importance of Narnia is that it will urge you to account for both your head and your heart!

Never confuse reason with bad news.  That is a prejudice of our times. Sometimes my friends who are secularists will have certain doomed nobility about them. They think it brave that they have decided that goodness, truth, and beauty do not exist and I suppose if that is what best reason taught us then they would be right. But surely it has not come to that! There are many good reasons to believe in a real and personal good. Analytic philosophy has been undergoing a revival of the most traditional sorts of theism which, by the way, never died in any case. Just because the news is good: there is a God and He loves us, does not mean we have to reject it. In fact, all things being equal good news should be believed over bad news if one is healthy.

Narnia, even the film which is simpler than the book, is a wholesome vision of reality in an alternative world. One thing to keep in mind, despite what you read in the press: Narnia is not a Christian allegory. Aslan is not Jesus. His death on the stone table is like the death of Jesus Christ, but also different.

Your experience with science fiction should help understand the difference. Narnia is a thought experiment, a bit of what-ifery. We both like the sort of book that asks, “What if Lenin had not taken the German train to Russian?” or “What if Napoleon had won at Waterloo?” Such experiments in the counter-factual often illuminate important events or ideas in history.

If all of that made sense, then you can see that a modern worry is removed by Narnia. Some foolish Christians, aided and abetted by anti-religious types, have acted as if the truth of Christianity meant that our world’s story must be the only story to be told. Now I do not know if there is life in the rest of the Universe. As a neo-Platonist, I think there might be. On top of that, I have no reason to think that this reality is the only one. For some reason, whenever people here that there might be another world they imagine a secular one or one that cannot account for the Divine events (the birth of Jesus Christ) that happened on this planet, but this is just a failure of imagination or better a conditioning of the imagination by hundreds of films and science fiction stories written by folk hostile to Christianity.

Since we have no idea what life is like on any other world or reality there are many possibilities. However, the only world with life on it of which we are aware (our own) is the most reasonable guide to what we will find. If the evidence points to the truth of Christianity here, then that evidence would not change on Mars or Vulcan or any other reality. The Christian God is not some local tribal deity. He rules as Creator over all things . . . which would include any other planet of reality. If this is so, and philosophical arguments for His existence do not depend in any way on the parochial notion that this is the only reality, then it is most sensible to think of those worlds in Christian terms and not secular ones.

In short, we are likely to find other worlds (if we are allowed to find them) either in a sinless state (in which case I hope we don’t go there as their own Satan introducing our evil) or going through their own process of redemption. Since God is rational and the Incarnation has happened, I would assume that process of redemption would be like ours but also take into account the facts that occurred at the first Christmas. Why not?

You should view Narnia as a baptism for your imagination. When I mention the idea that “other worlds” (if found) may confirm not deny the truth of the Gospel, most people are shocked, but they have no good reason for such unbelief. The arguments for the divinity of Christ do not depend on His having no other flock on other worlds. If they are good arguments, then they are not bound by space or time! The fact that the world of Narnia, where our myths are real, seems shocking to you is an indication of the effectiveness of secular propaganda. They pretend to know something (what other worlds will be like) that they do not know or they imagine (as we do not) that what we have learned on this world will have no bearing on the worlds we shall find.

Both of us understand that atheism or secularism is too simplistic to account for the world. Such folk are good hearted, but they try to explain too much with too little. Simple answers are better only if they explain all the facts otherwise they become simplistic. Goodness, truth, and beauty are at least as real as atoms, cars, and trees. I am much more sure that a “self” exists than that “things” exist. Maybe ideas can be reduced to matter, but it seems more likely that “matter” can be reduced to ideas. Better still is the Christian answer (the answer of Narnia) that both exist!

Narnia reminds us that reason and faith are related and not in opposition. You are never asked to believe anything despite your experience, but you are asked (as the children are reminded by the Professor) not to dismiss your experience or some other person’s just because it does not fit your simple secularist picture of reality!

You have often asked me how I can believe that Christianity is the “answer” when there are some many other world religions. What about Zeus or other gods?

Narnia is a very clever man’s partial answer to that question. Lewis believed, and I think he was right, that all the world’s religions (the great ones) have seized on truths. These truths, to the extent that they are truths, must be part of a sane world view. When Lewis has Bacchus, the pagan god of wine, appear in Narnia it is not because he is partly a pagan. It is because he saw the appeal in Bacchus. He knew the jolly times one can have with good wine and merry company, but also the corruption that came of worship of Bacchus. The strength of the Christian myth and Narnia shows this, is that it can account for Bacchus and get the good of him without turning him into God. Bacchus is too small for God and his pleasures too little.  

Of course this is not the silly idea that all religions are equally true. Lewis rightly saw and argued that Christianity was the fullest account of the truths of religion. This was not arrogance, but the product of careful examination. One need not dismiss all other religious as utterly false to say that Christianity is the largest truth nor can one merely assume that only the bigot thinks he is right. I believe that other religions contain dangerous falsehoods, but I feel no desire to persecute them (how contrary to the Law of Love!) or deny the great truths within them. On the other hand, I have never found any great truth in another religion that is not more fully (and nobly) expressed in the traditional Christian faith. Either that is right or wrong, but let’s not be silly enough to simply yelp about intolerance before examining carefully whether or not this is correct.

We live in a world in dire need of a good solid Narnian word: jollification. The Narnia film is cheerful, but realistic. There are real dangers in the woods . . . in a past 9/11 world we know there are real wolves in the woods. Some of our friends will sell us out to the wolves for a bit of personal peace. However, one need not despair or become intolerant. One can simply do one’s duty while enjoying a bit of Christmas. It is the totalitarians (on the right and left) who are always serious. We know how limited is our power and how little our dreams of utopia would match reality in this age! As a result, we can stop in the midst of even the most serious war and have some toast (with jam!) and wait for our gifts from Father Christmas. Our opponents on the secular lefts can never tell jokes . . . they can only deal in sarcasm and irony. They never feast for they fear too greatly dying to enjoy feast foods. Real Christianity is jolly without being unserious.  

I hope this Christmas brings some jollification your way.

Under the Mercy,

John Mark