Ben Zornes

Introduction

When I think of CS Lewis, I often drift back to the Autumn after I graduated high school. I was helping planting a church in Ft. Collins. This required me to drive from Denver up to FoCo a few times a week. Someone in the church very graciously gifted me a blue ‘91 Honda Civic, with the driver’s side door bashed in such that you had to roll down the window in order to reach out and open it to get out. Those regular roadtrips afforded me time to listen. The most common thing I listened to was Focus on the Family Radio Theater of The Chronicles of Narnia, and The Great Divorce, on my Dell Digital Jukebox. I had ripped those files from CDs, but in the ripping process the files had been corrupted somehow so there was a frequent digital pop, hiss, and skrzsh. Good times. But over that year or so, I listened to those over and over again, to the point of having them almost memorized.

What I began to understand the more and more I listened to Lewis, is that he really took delight in skillfully knocking over giants, like Corin of Archenland knocked over those Calormene bullies. Lewis wrote for our pleasure, not for our diversion. His writing often makes you wince and squirm, but this is because he is knocking over a giant that’s bullied you and you’re afraid of what might happen if it gets angry. But Lewis knew that while in the short term destroying giants is a messy business, such chivalric virtue leads to true pleasure and liberty. Again, to read Lewis is to read for pleasure.

I want to show four of the giants that Jack the Giant Slayer took down throughout his writings. This ought to equip you to both spot such giants in our current culture, and what’s more, knock them flat on their derrières.

The Reddit Atheist Giant Dwarf

Perhaps the greatest objection to the Bible has to do with the problem of pain and suffering. A rather frequent excuse from unbelievers as to why they choose not to believe in God is that He allows such pain on suffering. Why does your God allow bad things to happen to good people? This is a favorite go to argument from the fedora wearing Reddit atheists. This one is not so much a giant. It’s probably more of a dwarf. Nevertheless, it is an all too common objection, and it needs to be answered.

In reflecting on his loss of Joy Davidman in A Grief Observed, Lewis describes his pain in such a way in such a magnetic way as to leave his readers beyond a shadow of a doubt certain, that this is a man acquainted with grief. Here is a poignant example:

“I suppose that if one were forbidden all salt one wouldn’t notice it much more in any one food than in another. Eating in general would be different, every day, at every meal. It is like that. The act of living is different all through. Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything.”

Like his Lord, Lewis climbed down into suffering in order to slay it by the sword of the Word before our very eyes. Death is slain by the death of our Lord. Death loses its sting as we trust in the death & resurrection of our Lord, and imitate Him in our own sufferings. Lewis described that suffering with a simple eloquence. When people ask why evil things take place, often it is because they want an answer to the mysteries of their own experience with evil. By describing pain in such clear terms, Lewis defangs the beast. It is not the raging lion it appears to be, it is limited by the good and sovereign purposes of a good and loving God. But Lewis of course does not evade the question of why God ordains our sufferings. Lewis humbly took up the cup of the sufferings God ordained to him, and drank the cup down. Lewis also deals with pain and evil in much the same way that Paul does. How does God deal with Evil? God becomes a man and suffers the most grievous evil ever. Here is how Lewis puts it in Miracles:

This doctrine of a universal redemption spreading outwards from the redemption of Man, mythological as it will seem to modern minds, is in reality far more philosophical than any theory which holds that God, having once entered Nature, should leave her, and leave her substantially unchanged, or that the glorification of one creature could be realised without the glorification of the whole system. God never undoes anything but evil, never does good to undo it again. The union between God and Nature in the Person of Christ admits no divorce. He will not go out of Nature again and she must be glorified in all ways which this miraculous union demands. When spring comes it ‘leaves no corner of the land untouched’; even a pebble dropped in a pond sends circles to the margin.¹

Unpastoral Pastors

Lewis’ keen eye spotted that amongst the clergy dwelt a certain troublesome cave troll. While Lewis often humbly clarified that he was no theologian, nor a clergyman, he is the sort of layman that pastors need around them. A layman who sees keenly. Amongst pastors is a tendency to preach to their seminary professor. They preach to their academic peers. Their sermons are prepped with the mindset of appeasing the sensibilities of their favorite professor. This sort of danger really is an ever-present danger to ministers. The prophets of old saw it: Therefore, O ye shepherds, hear the word of the LORD; Thus saith the Lord GOD; Behold, I am against the shepherds; and I will require my flock at their hand, and cause them to cease from feeding the flock; neither shall the shepherds feed themselves any more; for I will deliver my flock from their mouth, that they may not be meat for them (Eze 34:9-10).

Consider how Lewis addresses this tendency amongst men training to be pastors, and turns this cave troll to stone through the sunlight of Bible sense:

“I have come to the conviction that if you cannot translate your thoughts into uneducated language, then your thoughts were confused. Power to translate is the test of having really understood one’s own meaning. A passage from some theological work for translation into the vernacular ought to be a compulsory paper in every Ordination examination. […] In both countries an essential part of the ordination exam ought to be a passage from some recognized theological work set for translation into vulgar English… Failure on this paper should mean failure on the whole exam. It is absolutely disgraceful that we expect missionaries to the Bantus to learn Bantu but never ask whether our missionaries to the Americans or English can speak American or English. Any fool can write learned language. The vernacular is the real test. If you can’t turn your faith into it, then either you don’t understand it or you don’t believe it.”²

The Well-Ackshully Giant

Now, let’s turn to see how Lewis deals with a cousin of cave troll we just discussed. One of the biggest giants that Jack’s writings knocks down is what I would refer to as the “Well-Ackshully Giant”. He lumbers into the room uninvited, and decides that what the conversation really needs is someone who corrects everyone else.

This isn’t to exclude the fact that some people really do need to be corrected, and Scripture provides us the instructions in how to do so. Correct them in love. “Brethren, if a man be overtaken in a fault, ye which are spiritual, restore such an one in the spirit of meekness; considering thyself, lest thou also be tempted (Gal 6:1).”

However, the Well-Ackshully Giant loves to be pedantic. This is really just evidence that he is a self-centered bully. His self-importance has turned him into a loathsome bloated creature. This is because he did not heed the Apostle Paul’s warning: Knowledge puffeth up, but charity edifieth (1 Cor. 8:1). The embodiment of this giant is Eustace Clarence Scrubb:

“Still playing your old game?” said Eustace Clarence, who had been listening outside the door and now came grinning into the room. Last year, when he had been staying with the Pevensies, he had managed to hear them all talking of Narnia and he loved teasing them about it. He thought of course that they were making it all up; and as he was far too stupid to make anything up himself, he did not approve of that.

“You’re not wanted here,” said Edmund curtly.

“I’m trying to think of a limerick,” said Eustace. “Something like

this:

“Some kids who played games about Narnia

Got gradually balmier and balmier — “

“Well, Narnia and balmier don’t rhyme, to begin with,” said Lucy.

“It’s an assonance,” said Eustace.

“Don’t ask him what an assy-thingummy is,” said Edmund. “He’s only longing to be asked. Say nothing and perhaps he’ll go away.”

Most boys, on meeting a reception like this, would either have cleared out or flared up. Eustace did neither. He just hung about grinning, and presently began talking again.

“Do you like that picture?” he asked.

“For Heaven’s sake don’t let him get started about Art and all that,” said Edmund hurriedly, but Lucy, who was very truthful, had already said, “Yes, I do. I like it very much.”

“It’s a rotten picture,” said Eustace.

“You won’t see it if you step outside,” said Edmund.

“Why do you like it?” said Eustace to Lucy.

“Well, for one thing,” said Lucy, “I like it because the ship looks as if it was really moving. And the water looks as if it was really wet. And the waves look as if they were really going up and down.”

Of course Eustace knew lots of answers to this, but he didn’t say anything.³

Lewis also uses this sort of character elsewhere; we find another Eustace-like figure in The Great Divorce:

A fat clean-shaven man who sat on the seat in front of me leaned back and addressed me in a cultured voice.
“Excuse me,” he said, “but I couldn’t help overhearing parts of your conversation. It is astonishing how these primitive superstitions linger on. I beg your pardon? Oh, God bless my soul, that’s all it is. There is not a shred of evidence that this twilight is ever going to turn into a night. There has been a revolution of opinion on that in educated circles. I am surprised that you haven’t heard of it. All the nightmare fantasies of our ancestors are being swept away.⁴

Don’t be a walking poster child for the Dunning-Kruger effect. Dunning-Kruger is the sort of person who is overconfident in their knowledge about everything. They are, in fact, oblivious to the depth of their their own ignorance, but their ignorance is plain to everyone else. You don’t need to correct everyone within earshot. In the age of social media, you can be baited into correcting the theology/worldview of some granny in Australia whose post happens to land on your feed. You don’t need to correct her. After all, she’s probably just a bot on a server in China or Russia, or more likely, Langely, VA.

The remedy to this is found in that wonderful exchange in The Horse & His Boy:

“My good Horse, you’ve lost nothing but ⁵your self-conceit. No, no, cousin. Don’t put back your ears and shake your mane at me. If you are really so humbled as you sounded a minute ago, you must learn to listen to sense. You’re not quite the great horse you had come to think, from living among poor dumb horses. Of course you were braver and cleverer than them. You could hardly help being that. It doesn’t follow that you’ll be anyone very special in Narnia. But as long as you know you’re nobody very special, you’ll be a very decent sort of Horse, on the whole, and taking one thing with another. And now, if you and my other four-footed cousin will come round to the kitchen door we’ll see about the other half of that mash.”

Giant Despair: The Caricature of the Puritans

Such humility can only arise from having faced another Giant and being delivered from it. This is the greatest of giants. The Giant Despair. The deliverance is the pristine Gospel of forgiven sins. We find Lewis, as the good evangelical he was, displaying like Bunyan before him, the Gospel as the key which sets us free from Despair’s castle. You have sinned greatly. At every turn, we are tempted to think that our past sins prevent us from holy living today. Or we despair due to our besetting sins, and content ourselves with living in the dungeon of sin’s misery. But this is not what the Gospel does in the life of God’s people. Buried in the archives of Lewis’ more academic work (English Literature in the 16th Century Excluding Drama)⁶ is perhaps one of the most potent Gospel explanations you will come across. He comes to the defense of the Puritans, who were caricatured in his day (as they often are in our own) as being dour, gloomy, and severe. But this depiction of the Puritans and the Reformers before them couldn’t be further from the truth.

Lewis looked at the prominent Reformers, Tyndale, Luther, and Calvin, and here were some of his observations:

“From this buoyant humility [upon understanding faith alone, freely bestowed by sheer gift, saves us], this farewell to self with all its good resolutions, anxiety, scruples, and motive-searching, all the Protestant doctrines originally sprung. For it must be clearly understood that they were at first doctrines not of terror but of joy and hope; indeed, more than hope, fruition, for as Tyndale says, the converted man is already tasting eternal life.”

Because the Puritans really believed that God had forgiven their sins entirely through the sheer gift of His grace: “Relief and buoyancy [were] the characteristic notes” of the Puritans life and Doctrine.

“For [Thomas] More, a Protestant was one dronke of the new must of lewd lightnes of minde and vayne gladnesse of harte’ (Dialogue, I . ii).” Luther “had ‘spiced al the poison’ with ‘libertee’.”

“Protestantism was not too grim, but too glad, to be true; ‘I could for my part be verie wel content that sin and pain all were as shortlye gone as Tyndale telleth us’ (More’s Confutation). Protestants are not ascetics but sensualists.”

Finally, Lewis arrives at Calvin. At least here, Jack the Giant Slayer comes to defend Calvin’s much maligned reputation. Lewis remarks that Calvin didn’t create the Giant Despair, and Lewis quips, “When Judas hanged himself he had not been reading Calvin.” Lewis draws our attention to Calvin’s teaching that through salvation we are freed to truly enjoy the things of earth:

That uncivil and froward philosophy’ which alloweth us in no use of the creatures save that which is needful, and going about (as it were in envie) to take from vs the lawful enjoyment of God’s blessings, yet can never speede unless it should stoppe up all a man’s senses and make him a verie block’. When God created food, ‘He intended not only the supplying of our necessities but delight and merriment’ (hilaritas). Clothes serve not only for need but also for ‘comelinesse and honesty’; herbs, trees, and fruits, ‘beside their manifold commodity’, for ‘goodlinesse, brauery, and sweete smelling sauour’.

In other words, Lewis arises in the height of modernist disdain for the metaphysical, to insist that in the bones of Protestantism we not only insist upon the transcendent, we also receive the full enchilada. The materialist of modernism renders matter itself meaningless. By Contrast, the Gospel gives you the world. This was the Gospel which the Protestants recovered in their scandalous message that your sins are entirely forgiven through the work of Christ, and all that is required of you is nothing but the faith which God also gives to you.

Lewis’ drives his readers to understand that in the Christian faith we find solid joys and lasting treasures, because all giants have been toppled by the Gospel. This is cause for true and everlasting rejoicing. As Aslan quipped at the conclusion of the Narnia stories: you don’t look quite so happy as I mean you to be.

ENDNOTES

1. Miracles, Ch. 14 ↩︎
2. God in the Dock, Ch. 10 ↩︎
3. Voyage of the Dawn Treader, pgs. 3-4 ↩︎
4. Great Divorce, pg. 16 ↩︎
5. The Horse and His Boy, pg. 82 ↩︎
6. Excerpts from English Literature in the 16th Century, pgs 33-34 ↩︎

OTHER NARNIA LECTURES