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Presented October 2006 at the Reel Spirituality Conference, Los Angeles Film Studies Center. Fair usage quotations from this essay are acceptable, but any reproduction of these materials is forbidden without express permission from the author. C. S. Lewis’s Theory of Film…If He’d Had One In Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, people sit in a cavern chained against a wall; a fire behind them lights the chamber. Puppet figures and objects are passed before the fire, and their shadows are cast where the viewers can see them. The people chained to the floor look at the performance of the shadow puppets and think it’s real life. Plato’s cave is the classical inspiration for the Matrix: people trapped in a world of illusion they believe is completely real. And some of them actually like it. I myself, just the other day, subjected my entire family to such an experience. There we were, glued to our seats (admittedly they reclined and had cup holders) while the fire of a high luminance projector shot pictures of people and objects which weren’t really there onto a great white wall before us. And we paid good money (fifty bucks with popcorn and drink) to sit there, watching sights and listening to sounds that didn’t exist—total illusion, complete lies. Plato would say we need to break the chains of illusion and turn and walk out of the cave into the light of the sun. That’s where the real world is. That’s where the illusion of the Matrix falls from our eyes. But what if Plato were wrong? What if movies were a window, a doorway like Narnia’s magical wardrobe into a world far more real than the illusion first suggests? What if Plato’s real world of sunshine and truth were to be found on the cave wall all along, or, at least, what if it’s there now, in that wondrous, magical place of shadow and light we call the Cineplex? C. S. Lewis was not a big movie fan. He once wrote to his friend Arthur Greeves, “You will be surprised to hear that I have been at the cinema again! Don’t be alarmed, it will not become a habit” (1 September 1933 Collected Letters 120).1 But he says some positive things about movies as well and his theories on myth and meaning lay an important foundation for a contemporary understanding of the importance of the film medium. How Everything Meant More Lewis understood that there was a magical window capable of showing us things that are as far from illusion as are people from the shadows they cast. His description of the window appears in The Last Battle where Digory says the new Narnia looks “More like the real thing . . .” (Last Battle 210), associating it with Plato’s ideal world (211-12). Lewis says, You may have been in a room in which there was a window that looked out on a lovely bay of the sea or a green valley that wound away among mountains. And in the wall of that room opposite to the window there may have been a looking-glass. And as you turned away from the window you suddenly caught sight of that sea or that valley, all over again, in the looking-glass. And the sea in the mirror, or the valley in the mirror, were in one sense just the same as the real ones: yet at the same time they were somehow different—deeper, more wonderful, more like places in a story: in a story you have never heard but very much want to know. The difference between the old Narnia and the new Narnia was like that. The new one was a deeper country: every rock and flower and blade of grass looked as if it meant more. (212-13) Theology speaks of heaven, fairy-tales of a magical world, and philosophy of a higher Platonic Reality outside the cave, a reality more real and truer than the one we see around us. Lewis suggests we get a glimpse of it through a window framed in a looking-glass. Have you ever seen an advertising brochure made for your work place or home town? Every time you look at the pictures, you recognize the location but somehow it doesn’t look the same. That happens whenever a place is put into a frame. Whether still photo or motion picture, places look different, even better than they do otherwise, once they’re inside a frame. Lewis’s heavenly Narnia looks like our own world would in a quick glimpse in a mirror: “deeper, more wonderful, more like places in a story” (213). Or a movie. In film a picture of the world is cast onto a frame and mirrored back to our eyes and everything in the picture is deeper, more wonderful and looks “more real . . . as if it meant more.” To which I then want to ask, “What in the world does that mean?” “What does it mean?” is a question we ask all the time, often about the symbols and images we encounter in books, songs, and movies. But do we ever ask, “What does meaning mean?” Usually when we ask for the meaning of a word, a line in a song, or a symbolic image, we want an explanation in words. In The Empire Strikes Back, Luke journeys down into his own cave of knowledge and confronts Darth Vader. He cuts Vader’s head clean off only to find his own face looking back at him. When my daughter first saw that scene she asked me what it meant. I told her, “It means Luke’s worst enemy is himself. He has to fight his own fear and doubt before he can face the real Darth Vader. What happened in the cave was a dream or vision.” I explained the meaning in words. But movies mean more than the words in them. Their magic is in the meanings they communicate beyond words. Their truth is in their images and experiential quality. In an obscure essay called “Bluspels and Flalansferes,” Lewis helps us begin a search for the meaning of meaning, and the magic that can be found in movies: [I]t must not be supposed that I am in any sense putting forward the imagination as the organ of truth. We are not talking of truth, but of meaning: meaning which is the antecedent condition both of truth and falsehood, whose antithesis is not error but nonsense. […] For me, reason is the natural organ of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning. Imagination, producing new metaphors or revivifying old, is not the cause of truth, but its condition. (Rehabilitations 157-58) This paragraph, unfortunately, is more of an addendum to “Bluspels,” and so doesn’t provide sufficient context for knowing exactly what Lewis means when he says imagination is the “organ of meaning” and meaning the “antecedent” to truth. To understand Lewis’s definition of meaning and how it impacts a discussion on film requires two explorations, one in a problem of epistemology that was central to Lewis’s thinking, and the other a careful analysis of Lewis’s theory of myth. Epistemology and Myth We begin with Lewis’s epistemological problem: the abstract/concrete or thinking versus experiencing dilemma. Lewis noted that, while experience allows concrete knowing that is intense and immediate but critically vague, reason allows careful contemplation that is clear, but abstract and time bound. How can reality be known with the clarity of reason but without the space of abstraction, of separation? And how can reality be experienced intensely but with a knowing that is complete? (“Myth Became Fact” 65-66). Humor exemplifies the dilemma: we can laugh at a joke or think about why it was funny. We cannot do both at the same time. Why is this a problem? Lewis’s own example is of pain. He thinks to himself, ‘If only my tooth would stop hurting, I could write another chapter for my book about pain. But when do we really know pain except when experiencing it in all its intensity?’ Lewis says that a partial solution to the thinking/experiencing dichotomy can be found in myth (and I will argue by connection that the same can be said of film). He makes a number of distinctions in his “Myth Became Fact” essay that will facilitate our understanding. First he makes a connection between “myth” and “reality” and then, strangely enough, a separation of “reality” from “truth”: “What flows into you from the myth is not truth but reality (truth is always about something, but reality is that about which truth is)” (66). Reality (or fact) is what is; truth is a proposition about fact. Next, Lewis describes our earthly existence as a “valley of separation” (66n). He suggests, “Myth is the mountain whence all the different streams arise which become truths down here in the valley; in hac valle abstractionis” (66). Now how to draw all of this together? The answer can be found in Lewis’s fantasy novel The Great Divorce. A ghostly man who has a passion for inquiry, (though not for actually finding any truth) is visiting the outskirts of heaven. There he meets an old friend who has moved beyond the ghostly stage to full presence, full being in heaven. The glorified man is there to invite the ghost to go further in. But the ghost refuses unless certain guarantees are met, especially “an atmosphere of free inquiry” (43). The glorified man tells his friend he will find no such thing; he will find final answers. The ghost responds that there is “something stifling about the idea of finality” to which the other replies, “You think that, because hitherto you have experienced truth only with the abstract intellect. I will bring you where you can taste it like honey and be embraced by it as by a bridegroom” (43). Thus, in Lewis’s vision, what can only be an abstract idea on earth is concrete reality in heaven. Experiencing and thinking simply become knowing. But how does understanding this help us define meaning? First answer: Meaning can be abstract language statements like my explanation of Luke’s internal struggle in Empire Strikes Back. But it can also be experiential and can precede language. In struggling to understand “the fading, vanishing of tasted reality as we try to grasp it with the discursive reason” (“Myth Became Fact” 66), Lewis suggests we think about the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. Orpheus was allowed to lead Eurydice by the hand, but the moment he tried to turn around and see her, she disappeared. If we focus on the myth, the abstract concept of thinking versus experiencing is suddenly “imaginable” (allegorized into abstract statements, experience is Orpheus holding Eurydice’s hand; thinking is her disappearing when he turns around to get a clear look at her; the myth, apart from this explanation, is an image of the idea). We may respond that we’ve never seen that meaning in that myth, to which Lewis replies, “Of course not. You are not looking for an abstract ‘meaning’ at all.” If we were looking for abstract meanings in the myth, it would stop being a myth to us and become an allegory. Lewis says that, in receiving the myth as a myth, You were not knowing, but tasting; but what you were tasting turns out to be a universal principle. The moment we state this principle, we are admittedly back in the world of abstraction. It is only while receiving the myth as a story that you experience the principle concretely. (66) In other words, when we take a meaning out of a myth, we turn it into an abstract statement, an idea. When we leave the meaning in the myth and do not try to turn it into language statements, the meaning remains a concrete experience. Through myth, ideas can be experienced as concrete thought. Lewis gives a hint that this occurs in the imagination, a mode of thinking that shares qualities of both reason and experience. Picture a line on a chalkboard representing a spectrum. At one end of the line appears the word “Abstract,” and the other end the word “Concrete.” The instructor applies these kinds of knowing to the definition of a man. Thus, at the abstract end of the spectrum is written a dictionary definition of a man, followed by a poetical expression of a man, a photograph of a man, and, at the concrete end of the spectrum, the instructor himself standing beneath the line:
Nowhere in this spectrum do we yet see “concrete thought.” Even the photograph perceived in the imagination is an abstraction of the real man, despite its close approximation to the concrete reality. But where in this spectrum do we fit Tolkien’s hobbits? Admittedly hobbits are like people, a version of the human, but in Tolkien’s myth they are not people, and therefore they are not abstractions of anything. Hobbits are concrete realities; they are real imaginary objects, that is, concrete objects of thought. Tolkien might say that they are real as “sub-created” objects (“On Fairy-Stories” 60), but for Lewis the significance is epistemological: when our minds turn to hobbits, we both think about and experience them at the same time. A fine example in film of thinking which is experientially immediate yet has the clarity of reasoned thought occurs at the ending of M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense. The protagonist, a child psychiatrist played by Bruce Willis, has helped a small boy who literally sees the dead to deal with his special gift. But when he tries to restore his own troubled relationship with his wife, he experiences a brilliantly edited “eucatastrophe” (to borrow Tolkien’s term3). At the moment the hero realizes he is dead, the audience is presented a montage of fleeting images from throughout the film that cause us to remake its meaning in an instant. New knowledge arises with the clarity of reason, but the speed and intensity of direct experience. Those who have seen the film can likely describe the experience as I do: “When I first saw it, I thought I was watching one kind of movie; when I got to this key point of revelation in the film, I reconstructed it in an instant—it happened so fast that I could not immediately put it in words, but I knew and knew it completely.” This is an experience of concrete thought. In myth and film, meaning is often communicated with the clarity of reason, the intensity of experience, and without abstract language. One might respond, “But language is used in The Sixth Sense scene.” Yes, but in it the language does not have the same effect. It is more like sounds than words; the concepts recalled come back to us in an instant, like solid objects. Now we can make sense of Lewis’s “Bluspels” essay. When we receive myth as story, we are experiencing a principle concretely. Only when we put the experience into words does the principle become abstract. But if we can know a principle either concretely or by abstraction, then meaning can be either concrete or abstract. This agrees with the statement in “Bluspels” that meaning is the necessary antecedent to truth (157). Some meanings are abstract propositions—word statements like my explanation of the scene from Empire Strikes Back. Word statements that correspond to reality are statements of truth. But there are other kinds of meanings which can only be grasped in the experiential imagination. Such meanings, the kind we get in myth and film for example, come prior to abstraction and apart from language. From them we do not get truths about reality but tastes of reality itself. Think of some favorite song, the kind that blows us away the first time we hear it. It moves us. It connects to us. It evokes feelings and thoughts we can’t quite describe. Then recall how a month or two (or six) later we actually bother to pay attention to the lyrics, and we finally figure out what the song was saying. In one sense we knew all along what the song was about. We understood meanings in it that couldn’t be put into words—meanings in the music itself, or in the way a certain phrase touched our hearts or connected with memories. The analysis of the lyrics was our reasoning self becoming aware of abstract, propositional meanings that our experiential self had not encountered. To use Lewis’s terminology, we first tasted the song, then we came to know it. Myth and Film For Lewis, meaning is connection, the perception of a relationship. Some connections are auditory, some visual, some intuitive, some bound by language, some clear, some vague, some conscious, some semi-conscious or even unconscious, some propositional and philosophical, some imaginative and heart-felt. What’s most important for us to understand is that we can’t think of meaning as solely an explanation in words. When we break out of that thinking, we begin to see the value of myth and film: in them we enter worlds where meanings become infinite. Myth is the most ancient of languages, film the most modern. Each is a language without language—a mode of languaging in form. Myth is a communication which is not in the words used to communicate it but in the form of the myth itself. Lewis explains this in his introduction to George MacDonald: An Anthology: We all agree that the story of Balder is a great myth, a thing of inexhaustible value. But of whose version—whose words—are we thinking when we say this? For my own part, the answer is that I am not thinking of anyone’s words. […] What really delights and nourishes me is a particular pattern of events, which would equally delight and nourish if it had reached me by some medium which involved no words at all—say by a mime, or a film4. (26-27) Lewis suggests the idea of myth as a mode of languaging even more clearly in A Preface to Paradise Lost saying, “giants, dragons, paradises, gods, and the like are themselves the expression of certain basic elements in man’s spiritual experience. In that sense they are more like words—the words of a language which speaks the else unspeakable” (57).5 Myth communicates meaning apart from words. And the same thing can be said for film. In “On Fairy-Stories,” Tolkien rejects the then widely held idea that myth is a “disease of language” and argues instead that the opposite is more the case (48). Shyamalan argues a similar point in his film Unbreakable. There he sees language as originating in pictures. Says the expert in comic art: “I believe comics are a last link to an ancient way of passing on history. The Egyptians drew on walls. Countries all over the world still pass on knowledge through pictorial forms. I believe comics are a form of history that someone, somewhere, felt or experienced.” Though we may not think much of comic books revealing the hidden nature of the universe, Shyamalan is making a point that can be verified and is so by Lewis’s good friend Owen Barfield whose book Poetic Diction influenced Lewis’s epistemology greatly. In Unbreakable, Shyamalan offers a theory of myth, of a concrete picture language that precedes modern language forms in which sign abstracts the signified. The image form, surviving in a kind of collective human unconscious, intrudes itself into contemporary culture through comic art. What it reveals is an archetypal pattern of the hero, Joseph Campbell’s “monomyth.” Shyamalan further intuits a quality of communicating which Barfield uncovers in his Poetic Diction (45-92). A careful study of linguistic history reveals that a strong distinction between sign and signified, between the literal and the figurative, is new to human thinking. For people before the modern era (even up through the medieval period), to name a thing was to invoke it; speech had physical consequences in the world; words were what they signified; metaphorical meanings were possible because their connective representation was in some way literal. Film resonates with Barfield’s view of past language. What it says is what it is, and what it shows is what it means. In the past, words were more like pictures, in fact more like physical actions. Barfield suggests, for example, the metaphor, “I have no stomach for that.” This phrase is used to express our dislike for a thing. It is figurative . . . mostly. When I say, “I have no stomach for modern art,” I’m not saying I get nauseous when I look at an abstract painting. However, if I say “I have no stomach for horror films,” I am not only expressing my dislike for them, I am also saying that the blood, gore, and suspense in them do make me nauseous. Here is an example of a phrase that is both literal and figurative at the same time. Barfield claims humanity used to both think and use language this way constantly. Speech and action were much closer to each other than in our own day. Well just as myth is a form of languaging and an expression of concrete thought, so film too is a mode of languaging which communicates to us like a physical action, as a concrete experience, and it is able to do so either without language or by converting language into experiential form. An example of film communicating as form without word can be seen in the early Tim Burton movie, Edward Scissorhands. In the middle of the movie, we see a long shot of the street on which Edward’s adoptive family lives. Husbands simultaneously walk out to their cars from the various homes to begin the morning commute. They get in the cars at the same time, pull out of their driveways at the same time, and drive off after a bit of hesitation and jockeying for road space. There are no words, only pleasant, Leave It to Beaver-esque music. But here’s what’s really strange: the houses and the cars are all painted pastel colors. From a greater distance the street might look like an Easter basket. The colors are all solid, no two tones: whole houses and cars painted pink, or blue, or yellow, or green pastel. Actions, sights, and sounds—all of them deliberate, intended. And without language, meaning is communicated in this scene. We certainly can, in this instance, put the meaning into words: “Suburbia is a world of conformity and façade.” But the point is that we get the meaning without having to put it into words. What film most shares with myth, and what makes it such a valuable art form, is its ability to communicate multiple meanings on multiple levels at the same time. Lewis calls myth “a story out of which ever varying meanings will grow for different readers and in different ages” (22 September 1956 Letters 458). In film, multiplicity of meaning occurs through technique. In any single shot of a movie, the following elements, each with its own meanings, will be present:
1) Images: people and their actions, objects (sets, props and costumes),
designated colors, lighting, titles, and the deliberately constructed composition
of all
these visual elements within the frame. All of these meanings, then, operate at once in film, often with a simultaneity and thickness of meaning greater than anything that even myth experienced through literature can manage. In lighting, color, angle, music and cuts, a mode of languaging “which speaks the else unspeakable” occurs. Limitation and Conclusion Though Lewis himself was a lover of books, his theory of myth works too well with film to deny its application. When Lewis wrote Arthur Greeves about going to the cinema, he went on to say it was to see King Kong because of its mythic qualities—it reminded him of his reading of Rider Haggard’s mythic adventures (1 September 1933 Collected Letters 120). Years later, he indicated having enjoyed those parts of the movie which took place on the island, though he deplored the last half set in New York (24 January 1949 Collected Letters 910). He liked the film when it was its most mythic. Still he would never allow film as a substitute for literature. In the very context of discussing Rider Haggard, Lewis made his most scathing remark against film in his essay, “On Stories.” There are a variety of pleasures to be derived from the reading of varieties of literature. One of these pleasures, available to both the highly educated and average readers alike, comes in the reading of adventure stories like Haggard’s She and King Solomon’s Mines. Lewis emphasized, though, that, just because the uneducated reader loves adventure romances, he doesn’t necessarily read them simply for an imaginative thrill. He may also “be receiving certain profound experiences which are, for him, not acceptable in any other form” (16).6 Lewis refers next to a statement made by his good friend Roger Lancelyn Green who “remarked that the reading of Rider Haggard had been to many a sort of religious experience” (16). Though unhappy with this choice of language, Lewis nevertheless argues that “Mr. Green is very much nearer the mark than those who assume that no one has ever read the romances except in order to be thrilled by hair-breadth escapes.” Then comes the key passage related to film: If he had said simply that something which the educated receive from poetry can reach the masses through stories of adventure, and almost in no other way, then I think he would have been right. If so, nothing can be more disastrous than the view that the cinema can and should replace popular written fiction. The elements which it excludes are precisely those which give the untrained mind its only access to the imaginative world. There is death in the camera. (16-17) My first critical response in trying to complete my Lewisian theory of film was, “Ouch! That death in the camera thing is tough.” My second response was to re-read the passage in context and wonder exactly what Lewis was saying. Here’s what I think he’s getting at: Something akin to religious experience,7 which educated readers can receive through poetry, popular readers can almost only receive through stories of adventure which, while achieving the status of mythic experience, don’t quite achieve the status of great literature. Lewis admired Rider Haggard’s books in this specific way, not because they were excellent in literary style or device but because they successfully communicated the mythic sensibility (“The Mythopoeic Gift of Rider Haggard” 98-99). He said the same of George MacDonald. While some literature, like the lyric poetry of Keats, cannot have its content divorced from its form and language (those qualities that make it literary), other literature like MacDonald’s fantasy tales communicates mythic meaning despite its language—the myth matters more than the book (George MacDonald 26-27). Lewis cautions or limits, however, this pro-pop-literature stance by saying that, if mythic experience can only be received among the masses through adventure story, then we must still avoid the extreme that says movies can replace popular written fiction. They can’t. There is still something movies can’t do that writing can. Lewis thinks film excludes elements by which only literature (even popular literature), can offer the untrained mind its only access to the imaginative world (16-17). That’s as far as I can go. I don’t know what the “elements” are that film “excludes,” nor how these elements in literature give “access to the imaginative world,” an access so contrary to the film medium that it would have Lewis exclaim, “There is death in the camera.” I can’t go further, save in speculation. My speculation is that Lewis saw in film the danger of imaginative passivity that many lovers of literature still see today: that literature can provide active engagement for the imagination that film cannot.8 The limitation is this: I cannot force C. S. Lewis into my post-modern vision of the grand and glorious co-existence of literature and film to come. He was a lover of books, not of movies. Upon hearing that Don Camillo might be adapted for the screen he said, I “can’t imagine how it could be made into a film. I suppose they drag some love story into it? (But then I’m, as you know, rather allergic to films)” (3 August 1956 Letters to an American Lady 59).9
But the positive conclusion is this: Lewis was ahead of his time in understanding
the ability of film to bear mythic meaning, and he was before his time in
understanding that pop-culture has its value (Elizabethans never asked whether
Shakespeare’s
play of the month was “high art” or “pop art”; he managed to be brilliant
and entertaining).10 In an amazing moment of bringing pop-culture studies into
the
classical lecture room, Lewis defends Milton’s portrayal of traditional mythic
archetypes by examining such portrayals in Disney’s Snow White (Preface 58).
His analysis is serious, his critique positive as well as negative, his pleasure
in the film clearly derived from its ability to communicate as myth. Myth
is the means Lewis recognized by which we manage to experience the fullness
of
meaning that only concrete thought can provide. I believe we should also
consider film to be a mode of languaging that can enable us to do the same
thing. Works Cited
Barfield, Owen. Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning. 1928. Middletown: Wesleyan
UP, 1973. 1 Regarding TV he (or at least his brother Warnie) was far less kind: "myself, I'm glad to say I don't often see television, but my brother, who sometimes looks in on a friend's set says he can well understand your feelings of horror and terror. He adds that to him the most terrible part of the business is the implicit assumption that progress is an inevitable process like decay, and that the only important thing in life is to increase the comfort of homo sapiens, at whatever cost to posterity and to the other inhabitants of the planet" (30 October 1958 Letters 475). (back to reference) 2 Hamlet 2.2.292-93 (back to reference) 3 "On Fairy-Stories" 85 (back to reference) 4 Emphasis added. (back to reference) 5 See also, "On Three Ways of Writing for
Children":
"For Jung, fairy tale liberates Archetypes which dwell in the collective
unconscious, and when we read a good fairy tale we are obeying the old
precept 'Know thyself'. I would venture to add to this my own theory, not
indeed of the Kind as a whole, but of one feature in it: I mean, the presence
of beings other than human which yet behave, in varying degrees, humanly: the
giants and dwarfs and talking beasts. I believe these to be at least (for
they may have many other sources of power and beauty) an admirable hieroglyphic
which conveys psychology, types of character, more briefly than novelistic
presentation and to readers whom novelistic presentation could not yet
reach.* Consider Mr Badger in The Wind in the Willows—that
extraordinary amalgam of high rank, coarse manners, gruffness, shyness,
and goodness. The child who has once met Mr Badger has ever afterwards,
in its bones, a knowledge of humanity and of English social history which
it could not get in any other way" (27). 6 So far Lewis's primary point is in regard to the divide between high culture and popular culture which, in this essay, amounted to a discussion of "classical" versus "popular" literature (while in our culture we might easily slip into a reading books versus watching movies version of this discussion). He's arguing that there is value to be found even in literary adventure romances, especially those that are mythic. (back to reference) 7 Doubtless the mythic experience of "Joy," or Transcendence that Lewis discusses throughout his theory of spiritual aesthetics, especially in Surprised by Joy, "The Weight of Glory," and Till We Have Faces. (back to reference) 8 While I agree there are things that literature can do that film can't (and vice versa), I say this conclusion is wrong, is born of the failure on the part of literature teachers to distinguish film as a medium from books, and is born of a failure among all educators to recognize the need for instruction in film literacy. But that's a different argument for a different paper. (back to reference) 9 Apart from Lewis's obviously low opinion of film as sensationalist, what really disturbs me about this quote is the phrase "as you know," which suggests that Lewis made negative comments about film more regularly than we have recorded. (back to reference) 10 Lewis refers to the rise "in our own time [of] the two odious adjectives Lowbrow and Highbrow" which he sees as producing a flawed distinction and as failing to see the value of "popular art" ("High and Low Brows" 98). Neal Gabler, in his wonderful book, Life the Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality, makes a strong historical argument that the argument between high and low art is a fairly new one in Western culture (see Gabler chapters one and two). (back to reference)
I have here maintained that a Christian theory of the power of film-as-medium begins with Lewis’s critical epistemological insight that thinking and experiencing are a dichotomy which must be overcome for truest knowledge of the real. A solid theology of film extends, however, through Lewis’s understanding of the nature of moral truth (natural law) and of moral education. The problem with our inability to know by reasoning and experiencing at the same time is most clearly visible in regard to this issue of ethics and moral development. In the arena of public policy, we often hear pundits and politicians speak of “putting a face on” a particular problem. It’s easy to talk about war, poverty, hunger, or injustice in the abstract and come up with what appear to be reasonable policies until a face is put on the problem—until we ourselves see the dead, the poor, the starving, the persecuted. When we experience our political and moral dilemmas, our compassion is far more awake than when we reduce them to abstract numbers and theoretical people. Lewis decried certain trends in the educational system of his day for teaching that emotional responses to imaginative texts and beauty in poetry and nature were purely subjective and revealed no truth. Without emotional and imaginative elements in the teaching of morality, he argued, no philosophical arguments for virtue, however clear, would produce virtuous people. Instead the educators of Lewis’s time were in danger of fostering “Men without Chests,” people who either live by their animal appetites, by cold, compassionless reason, or an inconsistent combination of both (The Abolition of Man 34). The bridge that Lewis finds in myth (and that I see possible in film) is integral to the achievement of moral education and heroic motivation. Myth, film, music, painting—these modes of languaging apart from language, this languaging (primarily but not exclusively through story) perceived in the imagination—these are key to education in ethics and the development of a right sense of the hero and the heroic life, a life, if you will, ‘with chests.’11 With regard to the significance of the arts or culture in general, Lewis once concluded that “culture, though not in itself meritorious, was innocent and pleasant, might be a vocation for some, was helpful in bringing certain souls to Christ, and could be pursued to the glory of God” (“Christianity and Culture” 28). Though he valued culture, Lewis did not see it as a final good—an end unto itself. Conversely, he did not see the purpose of art as for the production of sermonizing tropes or Christian propaganda. Even as viewers of art we ought not look to see if there is a hidden Christian message in a movie or book. On the contrary, The first demand any work of any art makes upon us is surrender. Look. Listen. Receive. Get yourself out of the way. (There is no good asking first whether the work before you deserves such a surrender, for until you have surrendered you cannot possibly find out.) (An Experiment in Criticism 19) Speaking specifically of literature, Lewis claims that it serves for entertainment before edification: “A great deal (not all) of our literature was made to be read lightly, for entertainment. If we do not read it, in a sense, “for fun”…we are not using it as it was meant to be used…” (“Christianity and Culture” 34). What edification comes from books isn’t even about finding truth in the text: “To value them chiefly for reflections which they may suggest to us or morals we may draw from them, is a flagrant instance of ‘using’ [texts for our own purposes] instead of ‘receiving’” [ them for what they are] (Experiment in Criticism 82-83). Rather, great art is about finding new ways of seeing—about seeing through the eyes of others: The nearest I have yet got to an answer [to the question of literature’s value] is that we seek an enlargement of our being. We want to be more than ourselves. Each of us by nature sees the whole world from one point of view with a perspective and a selectiveness peculiar to himself….We want to see with other eyes, to imagine with other imaginations, to feel with other hearts, as well as with our own….The man who is contented to be only himself, and therefore less a self, is in prison. My own eyes are not enough for me, I will see through those of others. Reality, even seen through the eyes of many, is not enough. I will see what others have invented….[I]n reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself…. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend Myself; and am never more myself than when I do. (Experiment 137, 140-41) Lewis values literature apart from utilitarian purposes. At the same time, however, he strikes a balance for us between a desire to enjoy art for what it is, on the one hand, and a desire to make good use of it, on the other, by offering a distinction between education and training: The purpose of education has been described by Milton as that of fitting a man “to perform justly, skillfully, and magnanimously all the offices both private and public, of peace and war.” …Aristotle would substantially agree with this, but would add the conception that it should also be a preparation for leisure….Vocational training, on the other hand, prepares the pupil not for leisure, but for work; it aims at making not a good man but a good banker, a good electrician, a good scavenger, or a good surgeon. You see at once that education is essentially for freemen and vocational training for slaves….If education is beaten by training, civilization dies. (“Our English Syllabus” 81-82) Christian thinking about the arts—here I mean the thinking of American, Protestant, conservative and/or Evangelical Christianity—has suffered from pragmatism and didacticism. Rather than “enjoy” or “appreciate” art, we “use” it like dishes and cars to serve functions we consider important. What Lewis is saying is that, if art can serve the Kingdom of God, it is a good thing, but art created for the purpose of spreading the Kingdom of God (which is to say, art created for any purpose other than what art is for—which is to be enjoyed as art) will generally be bad, that is, inartisitic. Why is that such a bad thing? Because it results in defeating its own purposes. It doesn’t reach anyone, and it quickly fades into obscurity. Contrary to a utilitarian view of art, Lewis, like his friend Tolkien, valued the making of fairy tale stories (for example) especially when produced as an act of “sub-creation,” of doing on a finite level what God did infinitely at the creation. The reason for such sub-creation is not to make something to be used for other purposes, but to participate in pleasure and worship in acting out in ourselves the Divine impulse of creativity given us as bearers of the image of God (“On Three Ways of Writing for Children” 27).12 Applied to the arts in general, the point is that we make art for the delight of making. That act alone is sufficient reason for a book’s, painting’s, or movie’s existence—it is made out of delight, out of a God given desire to imitate Him. It is an act of worship. Ephesians 2:10 says that we were made to be God’s “workmanship.” The Greek word “poiema” here is better translated “poetry.” God made us as His poetry. When we make art, we copy His activity in us. Lewis concludes that, to truly be effective in affecting culture, we must stop making the affecting of culture our first goal:13 “We must attack the enemy’s lines of communication, [this is true. But] What we want is not more little books about Christianity, but more little books by Christians on other subjects—with their Christianity latent”14 (“Christian Apologetics” 93). Of course everything we’ve covered so far here applies so easily to film and other art forms that I don’t need to belabor the point. All we have to do is think of the difference between watching The Passion of the Christ or To End All Wars versus watching the film adaptation of Left Behind and the point becomes obvious. Having established that Lewis believed the primary purpose of literature and the arts was not to be “preachy” or “teachy” (though speaking truth might be a secondary purpose), I’m comfortable now with discussing the important relationship between art and the education of a moral self. Lewis often surprises people. One of his most astonishing statements, though, is one hardly noticed at a first reading. In an essay entitled “Horrid Red Things,” Lewis argues that there are two things Christians must do to reach “modern” people. First, we must maintain the supernatural elements basic to Christian doctrine. We cannot give into liberal theology’s materialist rejection of the miraculous. That’s the easy one. Here’s the shocker: the second thing we must do to reach modern people is “try to teach them something about the difference between thinking and imagining” (69). Lewis illustrates: I once heard a lady tell her daughter that if you ate too many aspirin tablets you would die. “But why?” asked the child. “If you squash them you don’t find any horrid red things inside them.” Obviously, when this child thought of poison she not only had an attendant image of “horrid red things”, but she actually believed that poison was red. And this is an error….[However,] If I, staying at the house, had raised a glass of what looked like water to my lips, and the child had said, “Don’t drink that. Mummie says it’s poisonous,” I should have been foolish to disregard the warning....There is thus a distinction not only between thought and imagination in general, but even between thought and those images which the thinker (falsely) believes to be true. (70) You see, the little girl clearly knew that poison was a bad thing, but she also thought that it was red. She had a right idea and a wrong image. And this wrong image could clearly lead the little girl to some day taking poison, not because she think poison good, but because the object she’s about to swallow doesn’t look poisonous to her. Lewis presents this dichotomy again in The Screwtape Letters where a newly converted Christian is floundering in a sea of images confused with ideas. Elder demon Screwtape writes to hip pupil Wormwood about how best to tempt his patient: At his present stage, you see, he has an idea of ‘Christians’ in his mind which he supposes to be spiritual but which, in fact, is largely pictorial. Him mind is full of togas and sandals and armour and bare legs and the mere fact that the other people in church wear modern clothes is a real—though of course an unconscious—difficulty to him. (12-13) Consider how the American church today, without quite knowing how it was working, had some success in reversing this trend through converting the classical worship service into the contemporary celebration of song and music. Removing the images that got in the way of belief—stained-glass stuffiness, hardened pews and faces, boring liturgy and pasted smiles—the church in the last thirty years has been able to draw people to the truth of Christ, not by restructuring Christian content, as liberal Christianity attempted to do, but by reconstructing the imaginative artforms (primarily in music and architecture) by which it is presented. Lewis saw this exact need. At the writing of the Narnia books, there were those who believed that Lewis began by asking himself how he could share Christ with children which he thought best doable through fairy tales. Then he supposedly drew up a list of Christian truths he wanted to share with kids and put them into allegories. Says Lewis, This is all pure moonshine. I couldn’t write in that way at all. Everything began with images; a faun carrying an umbrella, a queen on a sledge, a magnificent lion. At first there wasn’t even anything Christian about them; that element pushed itself in of its own accord. It was part of the bubbling. (“Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What’s To Be Said” 36) Here is the example Lewis provides to the point made earlier that we should not make art for the purpose of affecting culture, but rather culture will be affected if we make good art. More important to the current point is what Lewis says came after the “bubbling,” after he recognized that fairy tales were the best form he could find for all the creative energy he was about to unleash on paper: I thought I saw how stories of this kind could steal past a certain inhibition which had paralysed much of my own religion in childhood. Why did one find it so hard to feel as one was told one ought to feel about God or about the sufferings of Christ? I thought the chief reason was that one was told one ought to. An obligation to feel can freeze feelings. And reverence itself did harm….But supposing that by casting all these things into an imaginary world, stripping them of their stained-glass and Sunday school associations, one could make them for the first time appear in their real potency? Could one not thus steal past those watchful dragons? (37) Lewis achieved this in Narnia and the church has begun to do the same again, showing great inroads in music if still falling short in literature, film and other artforms. The point is a simple one: human beings pursue knowledge of the real through two modes of thought: reason and imagination. The first deals in abstract language and prepositional statements. The second deals in images and concrete (even vicarious) experiences. Both matter for knowing, but imagination has been ignored or reduced in importance since the Enlightenment, and imagination is definitely more important in moral education than is reason. This is Lewis’s point in The Abolition of Man: St. Augustine defines virtue as ordo amoris, the ordinate condition of the affections in which every object is accorded that kind and degree of love which is appropriate to it. Aristotle says that the aim of education is to make the pupil like and dislike what he ought. When the age for reflective thought comes, the pupil who has been thus trained in ‘ordinate affections’ or ‘just sentiments’ will easily find the first principles in Ethics: but to the corrupt man they will never be visible at all and he can make no progress in that science. Plato before him had said the same. The little human animal will not at first have the right responses. It must be trained to feel pleasure, liking, disgust, and hatred at those things which really are pleasant, likeable, disgusting, and hateful….All this before he is of an age to reason; so that when Reason at length comes to him, then, bred as he has been, he will hold out his hands in welcome and recognize her because of the affinity he bears to her. (26-27) In plainer words: an imaginative understanding of moral truth—one gleaned from story, song, beauty, an education that ties real qualities of the real to the real feelings they ought to invoke—must precede a reasoned knowledge of moral precepts. Teach second graders the Ten Commandments all you want; it’s the story of Elijah and the prophets of Baal that they’ll hold onto when someone questions commandment one before them. Lewis says that “no justification of virtue will enable a man to be virtuous. Without the aid of trained emotions the intellect is powerless against the animal organism” (Abolition 33-34). If reason is to rule the appetites, it can only do so through the power of a third element, an imaginative sense of what’s right or ought to be or (the technical term that I use), cool. Coolness is what drew many of us to Christ. Whether it was the experience of a weekend long Christian Rave, the raucous joy of an Alt-Band concert praising God, the fantasy story by Lewis or Tolkien that drew our curiosity, the wise mentor, the high school friend who seemed to have it all together, the hip youth minister or the tattooed-and-pierced coffee house friend who showed the beauty or nobility of Christ to us before we ever thought Christianity might be true—that was what drew us first. In the same way, this aesthetic sense of the good and right is what draws us to a consistently lived moral life. Consider the following chart which describes a dilemma of ethics and emotion which I regularly see among young men in a Christian college culture:
Simply put, we are far less motivated by the thought of breaking rules than by the thought of falling short of what we imagine ourselves to be. Conversely, we are far more attracted to doing good if we see that the good is beautiful, inspiring, and noble than we are to doing good out of a sense of stoic obligation or duty. Medieval knights celebrated Virginity as an ideal—to be a man a thousand years ago was to be utterly pure and self controlled. We can recall that vision today. The life of a hero is a life of self-sacrifice. I tell my college men that, if they love their girl friends and fiancés, they should be willing to die for them. When they say they’re willing, I tell them to start by dying to themselves—to their desire to have sex with them before marriage. “If you love her that much, then love her enough to say to her face that no man will touch her, no man will violate her body, no man take her purity, starting with you. Protect her the way a medieval knight would a helpless damsel.” Virginity/celibacy cool? My guys probably couldn’t be made to think so. But heroic sacrifice for the women they love? That at least will help both sides of the brain start to believe what is right regarding sexual purity. In the passage on the creation of the Narnia stories above, Lewis connects story to stealing “past watchful dragons,” that is to recovering right moral sensibilities through imagination as well as envisioning Christianity by the same. His own poster child for the failure of abstract, storyless ethical education that leaves imagination and right response to experience out of the equation appears in his Narnia novel, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. It begins, “There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it” (1). Eustace is the worst kind of child Lewis could imagine: one raised by “modern” parents. Eustace hates fairy-tales, preferring books of information containing “pictures of grain elevators or of fat foreign children doing exercises in model schools” (2). Eustace is pretentious, petty, spiteful, and selfish. He is cruel to animals (even talking ones), steals water on a sea voyage when low supplies demand strict rations, acts a coward while hiding behind the self-righteousness of claiming to be a pacifist, and complains when the only girl on the voyage gets the only private cabin. Eustace’s problem is that he hasn’t read any imaginative books like fairy-tales or adventure stories and so hasn’t received proper moral instruction. He doesn’t even recognize a dragon when he sees one because “he had read none of the right books” (89). Upon approaching a dragon’s cave, Eustace is confused by what he finds there. Says Lewis: “Most of us know what we should expect to find in a dragon’s lair, but, as I said before, Eustace had read only the wrong books. They had a lot to say about exports and imports and governments and drains, but they were weak on dragons” (92). Later in the novel, Eustace’s cousin Edmund is able to solve a mystery because he is the “only one of the party who had read several detective stories” (131). In other words, his imagination has been trained through the experience of fiction so that, in his thinking, he is capable of seeing what others cannot. What Eustace most needs is to experience reality so that he can know with his heart and not just his head; however, because he is too far gone into the abstract, theoretical shadow world of facts, figures, and practical applications, he needs more than just a dose of reality. He needs a higher reality, a world of the fantastic far more real than his own. He gets Narnia. And he gets to Narnia through a motion picture. Okay, to be honest it’s a moving picture. A painting of a ship on a wall comes to life—the still picture begins to move—and Eustace is pulled through the frame into Narnia where, having learned before only in the abstract, about lifeless things, he can now learn by concrete experience of the really real. It takes becoming a dragon himself, and then being “undragoned” by Aslan, but Eustace does finally learn what his cold, analytical heart had been missing.15 Inspiration to moral excellence comes from an imaginative attraction, one fostered by story but not by story alone. Various disciplines use various terms to describe what the attraction is. For easy communication, I tend to use the word, cool. But the English teacher in me might use words like heroism or the heroic impulse. The Bible talks of the importance of pursuing honor and glory16 (so long as they are of God) and not merely righteousness.17 Business theory has, in the last few decades, begun to adopt the concept of vision and envisioning for goal setting and employee motivation. Of all of these disciplines I would not have us leave out the concept from Psychology of “role models.” Our heroes, our role models, inspire us to imitate their moral excellence (or their moral degradations depending on to whom we become attracted). Stories and experiences and artistic beauty will certainly draw us to or away form God. But so will our role models—those we experience in stories and those we experience in life. Lewis understood this integral connection between moral attraction and a lived moral life. To see a hero living out a life of moral excellence is to be inspired by that role model to do the same. Such modeling, said Lewis, is essential to our nature, even over the desire for human equality. For example, Lewis answers those who would debunk the monarchy by saying, “Where men are forbidden to honour a king they honour millionaires, athletes, or film-stars18 instead: even famous prostitutes or gangsters. For spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served; deny it food and it will gobble poison” (“Equality” 20). The spiritual nature of humanity demands that we have heroes. If not God, then saints, if not saints then kings, if not kings then movie stars and millionaires. Lewis predicted American Idol half a century before its inception. He also predicted the iconoclasm that would result from an absolute belief in equality. In “Screwtape Proposes a Toast,” the elder demon rejoices in the American love for dragging people down to a level playing field. The result: Under the influence of this incantation [democratic] those who are in any or every way inferior can labour more wholeheartedly and successfully than ever before to pull down everyone else to their own level. But that is not all. Under the same influence, those who come, or could come, nearer to a full humanity, actually draw back from it for fear of being undemocratic. (“Toast” 163-64) Conversely, then, Screwtape is happy to find the rise of a new kind of hierarchy simultaneous with the fall of the old one. Modern humanity rejects the pretentiousness, the snobbery of higher morality and elevates instead (even as he settles en masse into comfortable mediocrity) the sinner as his moral ideal. Thus, “Every dictator or even demagogue—almost every film star or crooner19 —can now draw tens of thousands of the human sheep with him” (Screwtape Letters 158). Lewis was concerned about the rise of the pop-culture hero whose heroism was built on anything but character. Writing in the fifties he said, “We all despise the man who demands continued assurance of his own virtue, intelligence or delightfulness; we despise still more the crowd of people round every dictator, every millionaire, every celebrity20, who gratify that demand” (Reflections on the Psalms 77). And yet he noticed more and more that, though we despised the celebrity sycophants, We hear it said again and again that the editor of some newspaper is a rascal, that some politician is a liar, that some official person is a tyrannical Jack-in-office and even dishonest, that someone has treated his wife abominably, that some celebrity (film-star, author21 or what not) leads a most vile and mischievous life. And the general rule in modern society is that no one refuses to meet any of these people and to behave towards them in the friendliest and most cordial manner. People will even go out of their way to meet them. They will not even stop buying the rascally newspaper, thus paying the owner for the lies, the detestable intrusions upon private life and private tragedy, the blasphemies and the pornography, which they profess to condemn. (59) Had Lewis but lived to see the creature born of the celebrity culture, that monster, doubtless churned up from the machinations of Screwtape or his fellows in the lowerarchy, he would have thought Paparazzi an apt name for the beast.
Lewis never indicted film for its moral shortcomings. What he indicted, and
fairly, was the celebrity culture it helped create (though mass media alone
was but one factor in the equation). The problem of redressing this issue,
of finding heroes in film and other mass media, is left to us. Works Cited in Addendum
Guroian, Vigen. Tending the Heart of Virtue: How Classic Stories Awaken
a Child’s Moral Imagination. 11 Understanding these ideas in Lewis will also establish a context for his critique of celebrity culture, thus allowing us to cover everything that Lewis said about film (at least everything I can find). (back to reference) 12 See especially Tolkien's "On Fairy-Stories" 74-75, 86-89. (back to reference) 13 See below for Lewis's own example of how the Narnia books came into being. (back to reference) 14 Lewis also says, "It is not the books written in direct defense of Materialism that make the modern man a materialist; it is the materialistic assumptions in all the other books. In the same way, it is not books on Christianity that will really trouble him [the anti-Christian]. But he would be troubled if, whenever he wanted a cheap popular introduction to some science, the best work on the market was always by a Christian" ("Christian Apologetics" 93). (back to reference) 15 For an excellent study backed by thorough research on the relationship between story and ethical development, see chapters seven and nine of William Kilpatrick's Why Johnny Can't Tell Right from Wrong. New York: Touchstone Books, 1992. Another excellent study is Vigen Guroian's Tending the Heart of Virtue: How Classic Stories Awaken a Child's Moral Imagination. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998. (back to reference) 16 See for example John 5:44, Romans 2:7, Romans 8:18, 2 Corinthians 4:17. (back to reference) 17 Lewis's sense of longing for God's glory as the experience of "Joy" ("The Weight of Glory" and Surprised by Joy) may contain, as a subset, this moral attraction to the beautiful good. (back to reference) 18 Emphasis added. (back to reference) 19 Emphasis added. (back to reference) 20 Emphasis added. (back to reference) 21 Emphasis added. (back to reference)
Lewis has a great deal to say about meaning in literature and the problems of correct interpretation. In the brief survey that follows, we move away from the epistemological problem of defining meaning and to the critical problem of the meaning of a text. What Lewis says about textual interpretation acts as an excellent guide to many interpretive issues in film. Here Lewis is not concerned only with the definition of meaning as “signification” but also with meaning as “intention.” In this case, Lewis deals with what texts mean and what their authors intended. Lewis’s view regarding where meaning resides in relation to a text can best be described by a passage from George MacDonald, a writer who influenced Lewis greatly: One difference between God’s work and man’s is, that, while God’s work cannot mean more than he meant, man’s must mean more than he meant. For in everything that God has made, there is layer upon layer of ascending significance; also he expresses the same thought in higher and higher kinds of that thought: it is God’s things, his embodied thoughts, which alone a man has to use, modified and adapted to his own purposes, for the expression of his thoughts; therefore he cannot help his words and figures falling into such combinations in the mind of another as he had himself not foreseen, so many are the thoughts allied to every other thought, so many are the relations involved in every figure, so many the facts in every symbol. (“The Fantastic Imagination” 320-21) This concept is echoed by Lewis in several instances: “Creation” as applied to human authorship [ . . . ] seems to me an entirely misleading term. We make ek upokeimenwn [with regard to what lies at hand] i. e. we re-arrange elements He has provided. There is not a vestige of real creativity de novo in us. Try to imagine a new primary colour, a third sex, a fourth dimension, or even a monster wh. does not consist of bits of existing animals stuck together. Nothing happens. And that surely is why our works [ . . . ] never mean to others quite what we intended: because we are re-combining elements made by Him and already containing His meanings. Because of those divine meanings in our materials it is impossible we shd ever know the whole meaning of our own works, and the meaning we never intended may be the best and truest one. (Collected Letters 20 February 1943, 555) On the issue of authorial intention (or authorial meaning), Lewis gives the following more detailed explication: I have said vaguely ‘meaning’ or ‘intention’. We shall have to give each word a fairly definite sense. It is the author who intends; the book means. The author’s intention is that which, if it is realised, will in his eyes constitute success. If all or most readers, or such readers as he chiefly desires, laugh at a passage, and he is pleased with this result, then his intention was comic, or he intended to be comic. [ . . . ] Meaning is a much more difficult term. [ . . . ] The nearest I have yet got to a definition is something like this: the meaning of a book is the series or system of emotions, reflections, and attitudes produced by reading it. But of course this product differs with different readers. The ideally false or wrong ‘meaning’ would be the product in the mind of the stupidest and least sensitive and most prejudiced reader after a single careless reading. The ideally true or right ‘meaning’ would be that shared (in some measure) by the largest number of the best readers after repeated and careful readings over several generations, different periods, nationalities, moods, degrees of alertness, private pre-occupations, states of health, spirits and the like canceling one another out when (this is an important reservation) they cannot be fused so as to enrich one another. (“On Criticism” 139-40) The first part of the definition of meaning in this passage, “the series or system of emotions, reflections, and attitudes produced by reading it,” matches the definition heretofore given of meaning as connection or relationship. But then Lewis discusses “false” and “true” meanings. Do not meanings, however, precede truth or falsehood? Meaning certainly does, but, as mentioned at the beginning of this section, we are no longer examining Lewis’s definition of meaning but have turned to his theory of literary interpretation, of finding meanings in a text. He argues that those meanings are true which the vast majority of the best readers throughout the years agree correspond to the text, and those meanings are false which occur in the mind of the most careless and prejudiced reader after a single reading. This is not to say that there are no meanings in the mind of the poor reader. In contrast to the authorial intent of man is the authorial intent of God, in which meanings multiply beyond those of any individual human writer. This is especially the case in the writings of the Bible. Lewis discusses this idea at length in Reflections on the Psalms: Hitherto we have been trying to read the Psalms as we suppose–or I suppose–their poets meant them to be read. But this of course is not the way in which they have chiefly been used by Christians. They have been believed to contain a second or hidden meaning, an “allegorical” sense, concerned with the central truths of Christianity, with the Incarnation, the Passion, the Resurrection, the Ascension, and with the Redemption of man. All the Old Testament has been treated in the same way. The full significance of what the writers are saying is, on this view, apparent only in the light of events which happened after they were dead. (84) Lewis notes that a “second meanings” approach to interpretation is distrusted by “the modern mind” and also open to “self-deception.” He claims that the approach must be kept, however, for two reasons. First, if the biblical texts are inspired, then multiple meanings are likely since God fills creation, including books, with a greater multiplicity of meanings than any individual author could put into the text (98). His second reason for reading “second meanings” into the Old Testament texts is that Jesus did the same thing. On the road to Emmaus, for example, He showed the fulfillment of Old Testament texts in His own life: “He accepted–indeed He claimed to be–the second meaning of Scripture” (98-99). Works Cited in Addendum Two
Lewis, C. S. The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis: Books, Broadcasts,
and the War: 1931-1949. Vol. 2. Ed. |
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