Fair usage quotations from this essay are acceptable, but any reproduction of these materials is forbidden without express permission from the author.

The Triple Enigma: Fact, Truth, and Myth as the Key to C. S. Lewis's Epistemological Thinking

This is the abstract for the dissertation.  Charlie intends to work the dissertation into a publishable book .

C. S. Lewis’s complex epistemology has drawn much critical interest.  Unfortunately, Lewis never produced a definitive epistemological essay or book; rather, his thoughts on how we know are scattered throughout his writings.  The result is critical confusion about such key issues as Lewis’s definition of myth, his view of reality, and whether or not he believed the imagination to be a truth-bearing faculty.  A sentence in Perelandra provides the framework for this systematic study of Lewis’s epistemology: “Long since on Mars, and more strongly since he came to Perelandra, Ransom had been perceiving that the triple distinction of truth from myth and of both from fact was purely terrestrial–was part and parcel of that unhappy division between soul and body which resulted from the Fall” (143-44, emphasis added).  This dissertation investigates this “triple distinction” and examines Lewis’s use of “truth,” “myth,” “fact,” and related words throughout his works.

            Lewis views “reality” as “sacramental” and multi-leveled.  God is the independent, uncreated “Fact,” and all created reality/fact depends entirely on Him.  “Truth” is defined contextually according to this hierarchy of being:  In the higher reality of heaven, truth is reality; in the lower reality of earth, truth is an abstraction corresponding to reality.  “Myth” in heaven is “What Really Is,” the “I Am,” palpably real and utterly factual.  On earth, “myth” reveals a glimpse of heavenly reality perceived in imaginative form.  At Christ’s Incarnation, heavenly myth became earthly fact.  Working together, reason and imagination can apprehend a clear and true vision of reality (heavenly and earthly).

            The introductory section reviews Lewis criticism and raises key questions; part two investigates Lewis’s view of “fact” and “reality”; part three examines Lewis’s view of “truth”; part four analyzes “myth” and “mythopoeisis”; part five considers “reason” and “imagination”; and part six synthesizes the study into a Lewisian epistemology