C. S. Lewis's Secret

As a child I somehow never ran into the Narnia books. Discovering them as a young adult, immersed at the time in the entire Lord of the Rings phenomenon, the Inklings, and a somewhat cockeyed conviction that the bumper sticker "Frodo Lives" was a legitimate way to protest the Vietnam War, I enjoyed the series as fantasy, but was only vaguely aware of (and not particularly interested in) its status as Christian fantasy. Only later, when I became a scholar of children's literature, did I realize that I'd essentially missed what, from the author's point of view at least, may well have been the most important part of Narnia.

Michael Ward, a priest of the Anglican Church and the co-editor of both Heresies and How to Avoid Them and the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to C. S. Lewis, is intimately aware of the exact nature of Lewis's work, as literature, as theology, as philosophy, and as Christian apologetics. His goal in Planet Narnia is an ambitious one: to argue that the series, rather than being the theological and narratological hodgepodge that Tolkien claimed it to be, in fact has a complex overarching structure that results as much from Lewis's work as a scholar of the English Renaissance as it does from his devotion to the Christian faith.

In 1947, Lewis was an Oxford don and one of the preeminent men of letters in the United Kingdom. That year, however, he published a book entitled Miracles: A Preliminary Study. In 1948, to Lewis's surprise, a young philosopher named Elizabeth Anscombe presented a paper at Oxford's Socrates Club (of which Lewis was then president), attacking his argument, as presented in Miracles, that "if the human mind gives access to truth about the world it must be because our thinking is not merely cerebral bio-chemistry, not simply a process going on inside our own heads, but a participation in a cosmic logos" (Ward 217)—or, to put it another way, that human beings cannot discover the True, except through communion with God. The naturalist position as put forth by J. B. S. Haldane and others, Lewis insisted, was self-refuting. Anscombe, however, although herself a devout Catholic, argued that Lewis's reasoning had logical errors. Subsequently the two academics held a public debate on the subject, with Anscombe filling the role of David to Lewis's Goliath, and, like David, prevailing against the odds. There is disagreement over Lewis's reaction to this public defeat. Some of his friends insisted that Lewis was crushed by the experience and turned to children's literature as a retreat from serious theological discussion. Others, including Anscombe herself, felt that Lewis was only marginally depressed by this event, and it is true that he later amended Miracles, not to strengthen his position against Anscombe, but to incorporate her arguments into his own. In any case, soon after the debate, Lewis began work on the first of the Narnia Chronicles, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

A significant quantity of ink has been spilled in various attempts to interpret the Narnia books. Some scholars have analyzed individual volumes for their Christian message. Others have attempted to find theological and philosophical connections among the books. Still others have denied that such connections exist, except for those of the most haphazard and fragmented sort. In recent years, the children's novelist Philip Pullman has strongly attacked the Narnia books, arguing in his essay "The Dark Side of Narnia" that Lewis had a "life-hating ideology" (qtd. in Ward 209). Ward, however, believes that not only has he found the key to Narnia, but that it is an entirely positive one. He suggests that the books, rather than representing a retreat from theological discourse, "were a deliberate engagement with [. . .] [Anscombe's] critique of his theology" (4). The Chronicles, Ward tells us, "do not lack coherence, either as a series or when considered as seven individual texts, and their 'controversial' elements are to...