“Between History & Myth: C.S. Lewis & the ‘grand miracle’ of the incarnation”

WHO IS THE TRUE RULER OF NARNIA?  Towards the end of his life, C.S. Lewis (1898 – 1963) began to write children’s books.  He began with a supposition – suppose that Jesus had been incarnated into a world of sentient, rational animals?  What would that look like…?  In The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950; movie: 2005), the four Pevensie children – Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy – stumble through the wardrobe into Narnia and discover this magical world to be “frozen” in a state of perpetual winter under the rule of the White Witch.  Before long, they begin to hear tell of a certain “Aslan” who left Narnia some time ago, is the sworn enemy of the White Witch, and whose imminent return is rumoured throughout Narnia.  In fact, so the children are told, it is Aslan who is to blame for Narnia’s sad state of affairs: “always winter, but never Christmas”.  Once the four siblings meet Mr. and Mrs. Beaver, the rodent couple tell them that in truth, Aslan is the son of the “Emperor beyond the Sea”, he is the true ruler of Narnia and that he is “on the move”, i.e. Aslan is set to return to Narnia and put an end to the reign of the White Witch, who is in fact the real enemy who usurped the throne and is, in truth, responsible for Narnia’s frigid condition.  The children are faced with a choice – which story will they believe: the one according to which Aslan is the enemy of the legitimate Witch-Queen or the one according to which Aslan is the true King who will put an end to the Witch’s wintery rule?  As the children soon discover, their decision has consequences – whichever story they choose to believe, they will be caught up in the war that is about to break out between Aslan and the White Witch.  Their choice will determine the side on which they will fight.

     As for the 4 Pevensie children, so for the question of “truth” in general.  Modernity would have us believe that “truth” is simply a matter of looking at “the facts”.  The 18^th-century Enlightenment posited the existence of a universal reason that every reasonable/rational human being could access in order to acquire knowledge of “truth”.  However, postmodernity has shown us that there is no such thing as just “the facts”.  Every “fact” is an interpreted fact, every fact is someone’s fact, every fact has “value” attached to it, and every fact is perceived from a certain perspective.  (We could substitute the word “story” for “fact”, and the same would hold true). 

How can we possibly take the (biblical) Christmas story seriously today?

     For 2,000 years, the Church has been telling a story about the birth of Jesus.  This story, different versions of which can be found in the Gospels of St. Matthew, St. Luke and St. John – is codified in the Nicene Creed:

“We believe… in one Lord Jesus Christ …true God from true God… who for us […] and for our salvation, came down from heaven, and by the Holy Spirit was incarnate of the Virgin Mary, and became man…”

Right off the bat, objections can be made.  This is not quite how the individual evangelists tell the story of Jesus’ birth.  St. Matthew and St. Luke are agreed that Jesus’ conception is due to the working and power of the Holy Spirit, and that Mary was a virgin when she conceived Jesus, but it is St. John who uses the language of incarnation: “the Word was made flesh…” (Jn. 1.14).  St. John is not concerned with the “human” details of Jesus’ birth – in fact, Jesus’ “mother” is not even named in John’s Gospel!

     The cultural shift that ultimately marked the end of Christendom was the 18th-century Enlightenment (“modernity”), a cultural, political and intellectual revolution which put an end to the Church’s political power and removed the Church from its position in Western society as the arbiter of truth.  From this point on, human reason (especially science) would establish, primarily in the academic milieu and then in the wider culture, the criteria for what was “true”.  The Christian tradition was relegated to the private sphere of personal opinion, and was no longer considered to be a valid source of truth that could be applied to the public sphere.

     During the 18th century, “critical” study of the Bible appeared in European universities.  This “critical” approach was modeled on the principles of modern scientific methods of research.  This academic study of Scripture had the explicit agenda of discrediting the historical foundations of Christian doctrine, thereby undermining the authority of the Church.  After all, the Bible is premised upon the conviction that Israel’s god was the one true God who had created the world and that this God had acted within the life of the nation of Israel in order to rescue her (the Exodus from Egypt) and, through her, the entire creation.[1]  Within the Academy, the Bible was studied in the same way that one would study any ancient text and was not believed to be any more “true” than any other ancient book.[2]

     Other objections to the Bible's story of the birth of Jesus can be, and indeed have been, made. 

--THE RATIONAL OBJECTION: “As enlightened, modern people, we do not believe in such superstitious notions as angels, visions, revelatory dreams, virgin births, or even miracles in general.” (We “know” these types of things don’t exist/don’t happen).  Do we experience cognitive dissonance when we say the Creed every week?

--THE COMPARATIVE MYTHOLOGY OBJECTION: “A story of a God who becomes human via a virgin birth, dies and then resurrects – that sounds strangely familiar.  Similar myths can be found in many different cultures of the ancient world.  Why should we lend any more credence to the New Testament’s story of Jesus than we would to any other myth of a dying and rising god?”[3]

--“to get at the ‘truth’ of the Gospel stories, we have to strip away all the ‘mythological’ factors.” (À la Bultmann)

--THE “ABUSIVE POWER OF ORTHODOXY” OBJECTION: “The turning of the human Jesus into a divine being (including the explanation of his birth in terms of divine intervention) was a power-play on behalf of the Church, who only accepted into the canon of the New Testament those Gospels which emphasized Jesus’ divinity, thereby bolstering the power of the Church as well as that of the emperor (Constantine) over the (presumably naïve) populace of the 4^th-century Roman empire.  Initially, there were many different forms of Christianity, including Gnostic expressions of the faith; however, these ‘heretical’ expressions of Christianity were suppressed in favour of ‘orthodoxy’, the system of belief which was codified by the Bishops at the Council of Nicaea (325 AD) under the auspices of the emperor Constantine I; this council decided which books got into the canon of Christian Scripture and it was here that the ecclesial hierarchy aligned itself with the imperial power of Rome.”

--THE NEO-GNOSTIC OBJECTION: “True spirituality is not about a God who acts in the public, real, verifiable world of space, time and matter, but is rather about us getting in touch with our own, inner divine spark – it’s about finding out who we really are.”[4]

     One way of side-stepping these embarrassing objections to the (biblical) Christmas story is to make appeal to:

--THE “RELIGIOUS” OBJECTION: “We shouldn’t approach the stories of Jesus’ birth as actually referring to events in the real world; these are symbolic, archetypal tales that serve as metaphors for the human condition in general, or to various stages of psychological development, or are designed to inspire within us certain feelings that are appropriate to the religious celebrations that occur at this time of the year.  After all, Christmas is really about family, goodwill, hot chocolate and …gifts!  We shouldn’t get hung up on questions of whether Jesus’ birth actually occurred in a way that resembles the evangelists’ accounts of it; just enjoy the holiday season already!”

Sometimes one gets the impression, especially at Christmas and Easter (the two moments when the church is packed), that there is a good amount of embarrassment in the Church about the Gospel texts that we read during these Feasts.  Sometimes one feels like we’re “stuck” with reading (and preaching about) these texts.  So, since we have no choice but to read and comment on them, we come up with ways of making these texts easier to swallow.  We turn them into something they’re not – whether descriptions of the author’s state of mind, or the nature of his (her?) religious feelings/experiences, etc.  One thing we “know” – we can’t take these stories at face value; we can’t take them seriously.  Or can we?

     Read at face value, the New Testament Gospels are claiming to be talking about the real world, about events that occurred in the real world, and that have real consequences for all of humanity.  In fact, the entire New Testament assumes that the death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth was the turning point of human history, was the ultimate and final revelation of the Creator God & was the moment of salvation for the entire world – in a word, was the greatest “news” that the world had ever heard (and needs to hear!).  Working backwards from that conviction, Matthew & Luke composed their infancy narratives and tell the story of Jesus’ virginal conception and all the strange phenomena that accompanied his birth.

     If we attempt to domesticate the New Testament, we are doing its authors an injustice.  Better to reject their claims flat out than to attempt to twist their words into something less shocking, less all-encompassing, less demanding, less awe-some than they actually are, all the while pretending that we actually “believe” them.  That might sound drastic, but that’s what the Gospels are!  They’re like a trap – once you read one, you’re faced with a choice.  As Lewis said – don’t domesticate Jesus into a “good moral teacher”; he didn’t leave that option open to us.  Lewis said that faced with Jesus and the claims he made, we have basically 3 options – either we believe that he was a liar, a lunatic or that he is Lord (who the evangelists say he was).

     This might be difficult for us to grasp, since we, as Westerners living in a post-Enlightenment world where there is a strict divide between the secular (the public sphere) and the sacred (the private sphere), don’t tend to think of our religion in those terms.  We are used to hearing these stories read aloud in church, but we all “know” that what happens at church doesn’t have anything to do with what happens at work or in politics.  Or does it?  (After all, we do process through the streets of our cities at Easter and for Corpus Christi…)

How did C.S. Lewis, an early 20^th-century atheistic Oxford don, come to call the birth of Jesus “the Grand Miracle”, and devote the second half of his life to writing books for people of all ages in order to help them grasp the significance of the “true myth” of Christmas?

     Let’s take a look at a man who was wrestling with these very questions, back in the 1920’s at Oxford University in England.  That man’s name was C.S. Lewis (1898 – 1963).  By the time he became a teacher at Oxford, Lewis had abandoned his childhood faith and had become, by his own admission, an agnostic (atheist?).  And yet, he continued to be haunted by religious questions – questions about truth, the meaning of life, etc.  Lewis maintained an academic/philosophical interest in religions, especially Christianity and Hinduism.  As a professor of English literature and a graduate from Oxford’s program of classical studies, Lewis was very well acquainted with the myths and stories of the Ancient World, as well of those of Norse and Anglo-Saxon culture.  Among Lewis’s colleagues at Oxford was the philologist J.R.R. Tolkien, whom you might know as the author of the famous Lord of the Rings trilogy along with The Hobbit.  Lewis and Tolkien were part of a group of writers called The Inklings.  They would meet regularly in a pub in Oxford called The Eagle and Child (“Bird & Baby”) and discuss literature as well as read portions of their as-yet-unpublished work to each other.  Tolkien was a staunch Catholic, and other members of the group were also practicing Christians.  These Christian literary colleagues would have a profound effect on Lewis…

     The story is told of how, on Saturday, September 19^th 1931, Lewis had invited Tolkien and another friend, Hugo Dyson, to his rooms on campus and, as was their custom, the three friends had stayed up talking and drinking into the wee hours of the morning.  Eventually, they decided to take a walk through the woods beside the university.  During the course of this walk, Lewis commented on the mythical nature of the New Testament’s stories about Jesus.  To “Jack”’s surprise, “Tollers” agreed with him and went on to say, “But they’re true myths”.  This idea captivated Lewis’s imagination – the Gospels were describing, in mythical language, events that they believed had actually happened.  This conversation would prove to be a turning-point in Lewis’s return, not only to a vague belief in “God”, but to the Christian faith.

     LEWIS’ NEW UNDERSTANDING OF “MYTH”.  In his autobiography, Surprised by Joy, Lewis writes:

“I was by now too experienced in literary criticism to regard the Gospels as myths.  They had not the mythical taste.  And yet the very matter that they set down in their artless, historical fashion …was precisely the matter of the great myths.  If ever a myth had become fact, had been incarnated, it would be just like this… Here and here only in all time the myth must have become fact; the Word, flesh; God, Man.”[5]

Here we can see Lewis moving from the perspective according to which the Gospels are “myths”, i.e. “false”, to that according to which they are true “myths”, i.e. stories with “mythical” content (e.g. a dying and rising god) that had actually happened in history.

     Tolkien’s way of looking at things gave Lewis a lens which allowed him to see Christianity as bringing to fulfillment such echoes and shadows of the truth that arose from human questing and yearning.  Such myths offer a fragment of the truth, not its totality.  They are like splintered fragments of the true light.  For Tolkien, Christianity provided the total picture, which both unified and transcended these fragmentary and imperfect insights.  The Christian narrative brings to fulfillment and completion imperfect and partial insights about reality, scattered abroad in human culture.  The great pagan myths, Lewis suggested, were “dim dreams or premonitions” of the greater and fuller truth of the Christian gospel.

“We should…expect to find in the imagination of great Pagan teachers and myth-makers some glimpse of that theme which we believe to be the very plot of the whole cosmic story – the theme of incarnation, death, and rebirth”.[6]

     It is common knowledge that human beings have always engaged reality, not primarily through reasoned analysis, but rather by telling stories.[7]  It is also widely held that there are only between 7 – 10 “plots” into which (nearly) all of the world’s stories tend to fit.[8]  The ancient Israelites told stories about the creation of the world, the call of Abraham, the Exodus from Egypt, etc.  Jesus grew up hearing these stories being read in the synagogue; Jesus told stories (parables) of his own, in which he re-interpreted (and subverted!) Israel’s ancient tales and advanced the claim that he was bringing the story of the people of God to its completion (climax).  The evangelists tell the story of Jesus as the story of Israel, recapitulated and brought to fulfillment.  As in The Lion, the Witch & the Wardrobe, “truth” is always a matter of competing stories!  Lewis wrote the Chronicles of Narnia as a way of getting past the "watchful dragons" of rationalism and skepticism which are often present in the minds of modern Westerners.  Lewis desired, through his works of fiction, to permit people to experience the power of the Gospel story - in the form of an imaginary land full of fantastic creatures - without their "defense mechanisms" being triggered.  Lewis wanted to cause people to wonder - as he had done before his conversion - What if this really happened?

POWERPOINT PRESENTATION


C. S. Lewis: Why He Matters Today

C.S. Lewis: My Life's Journey

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[1] This is not to say that “critical” study of the Bible does not have its place.  On the contrary, we need scholars of the ancient world to translate the text of the Bible into modern languages (as well as reveal the inadequacies of past translations), and to help us understand the culture of the biblical period so that we can better interpret the Bible as believers.  It is “traditional”, within academic contexts, to bracket out from the discussion of the Bible questions of the inspiration of the biblical text or a purported divine origin for the books of the Bible.  When the Bible is read and commented upon within the context of the Church’s liturgy, the biblical text is received as “the Word of the Lord” or “the Gospel of the Lord” (i.e. the “Word of God”); cf. Harrisville, Roy A. & Walter Sundberg, The Bible in Modern Culture: Baruch Spinoza to Brevard Childs, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002 [1995].

[2] The way the Bible is read within the Academy is radically different from the way it is read within the Church.  From the earliest days of the people of God (ancient Israel), thinking about God (“theology”) was never simply a question of reading scriptural texts (in their original contexts).  “Theology” was always done in the context of the community, especially during those moments when the community gathered for formal worship (sacrifices, prayers, songs, festivals, liturgy, etc.).  “Theologians” were not simply people (mostly men) who wrote books about the Bible and Christian beliefs; no, theologians were leaders within the community – prophets, apostles, Bishops, priests, etc.  So, “theology”, for most of the Church’s history, was thinking about God in the context of worship and based, partly, on reflection on Scripture, which, in turn, often led to the writing of more (what would become) Scripture.

[3] Cf. the popular internet video “Zeitgeist” (i.e. “spirit of the age”, released in 2007) which attempts to debunk, among other things, the “Christ myth”, according to which Christianity’s portrayal of Jesus consists, not of an actual historical person, but of a recurring myth about a human-divine hybrid that was born of a virgin, died and then came back to life, a myth that can be traced to almost all of the religious cultures of human history.  This film is a quintessential postmodern project, and is an attempt to explain what is wrong with the world by a series of conspiracy theories about economics, politics, terrorism and …religion.  http://www.zeitgeistmovie.com/ (accessed November 29, 2017).  Interestingly, the website’s home page features the Modern slogan “It’s time to grow up”.  Compare that with Kant’s remarks (quoting Horace) in the 18^th century: “Dare to think for yourself!”  Part of the Enlightenment’s rhetoric was that, with the dawning of the Age of Reason, humanity had finally “come of age”.  This goes to show that the Enlightenment’s spokesmen described the 18^th-century intellectual revolution in mythological terms (i.e. all of human history had been leading to this moment)!  Interestingly, the movement behind the website and the film claims to have the goal of uniting humanity, establishing worldwide peace and providing for sustainable human flourishing.  Where have we heard that before? … Actually, this is the biblical dream (cf. Revelation 21-22); cf. Ehrman, Bart D.  Did Jesus Exist? New York: HarperOne, 2012, pp. 1-34.

[4] Gnosticism poses absolutely no threat to empire.  As one well-known NT scholar has pointed out: it was not the people reading the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Mary and the other gnostic writings who were being thrown to the lions in Rome’s Colosseum; rather, it was those who were reading Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

[5] Lewis, C.S.  Surprised by Joy, London & Glasgow: Collins, 1959 [1955], p. 236.

[6] Cf. McGrath, Alister E. The Intellectual World of C.S. Lewis, West-Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014, pp. 66-67.

[7] This is true, even of modern cosmological theories such as “The Big Bang”; cf. Gleiser, Marcelo, The Dancing Universe: From Creation Myths to The Big Bang, New York: Dutton (Penguin Group), 1997, p. 3; cf. also Gottschall, Jonathan, The storytelling Animal: How Stories make us Human, New York: Mariner Books, 2012; All scientific research proceeds on the basis of the prevailing “paradigm” at the time of research.  Every once in a while, a “paradigm shift” will occur, and newly-discovered data will force the crafting of a new overarching theory which can account for the data – e.g. Einstein’s theory of General Relativity, which called into question the then-current understanding of the nature of the space-time universe.  More recently, Quantum Mechanics has called into question General Relativity’s capability to adequately describe all the (up-to-now discovered) complexity of the universe; cf. Kuhn, Thomas S., The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (50^th Anniversary Edition), Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 2012 [1962, 1970, 1996].

[8] E.g. Booker, Christopher, The Seven Basic Plots: Why we tell Stories, London & New York: Bloomsbury, 2004.