Watching the Wheels

I begin today following up on the last post with one more comment about the Sun in C. S. Lewis’s The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Since the character of each traditional planet is presented by Lewis as a “splintered fragment of the true light,” i.e. as one part of the character and nature of Christ, then we can easily see Christ in Lewis’s conception of the Sun since our Lord is the source of knowledge and of transformation. And since Christ is our exemplar in all things pertaining to life and godliness, where we find ourselves in positions (professional and otherwise) of teaching and transforming, we follow and learn from Christ.

Next in the Narnia series (following the original order, of course) is The Silver Chair. The mention of silver in the title provides our link to the moon. As Michael Ward points out, in medieval and Renaissance cosmology the moon divides creation into the changeable, transient things below its sphere and the perfect, eternal things above. You’ll remember (I hope) that a large portion of the story takes place underground and involves debates with the witch about the differences between the world below the ground and the world above. The moon also affects mental health, providing another division, this time between sanity and luna-cy, a division whose effects are seen in Rilian as he passes between those two states each day. Are you a health-care worker? Whether you’re providing therapy to the mentally ill or just putting a band-aid on a child’s knee, learn from the Great Physician. (I don’t know what it has to do with the moon, but I want to mention my favorite allegorical image from the whole series, which appears in this volume: Eustace and Jill are looking for a message carved in the stone, but it doesn’t occur to them that the writing might be sized appropriately for the local giants, and they fail to recognize the smooth, closed canyons they walk through as the letters they’re seeking.)

The fifth of the Chronicles is The Horse and His Boy. Mercury is present everywhere in the book as rapidly traveling children and horses and lions merge and separate like beads of quicksilver. Human followers of the god of speed include traders and carriers. In his aspect as messenger, Mercury is a type for journalists and messengers. In his work of dividing and joining, he guides people who work in mathematics and analysis. If your line of work falls within any of these areas, learn from Jesus, the Word who will return traveling as fast as lightning across the sky.

In The Magician’s Nephew, we read of the creation of Narnia. Ward links this book with Venus. Our sex-crazed culture thinks only of Venus’s association with eroticism, but Lewis concentrates more (or totally) on her beauty and fertility. Anytime you make things, especially where you produce beautiful things, whether that means children, crops, or works of art, learn how to do this from the One through whom all things were made, remembering that “He has made everything beautiful in its time.” (Anyone squeamish about the whole idea of comparing Jesus to the planets worshiped by ancient pagans will do well to remember that He refers to Himself once as the Morning Star and is in many biblical passages compared to the Sun.)

There’s one book left and one planet, and as it turns out, The Last Battle and Saturn go together very nicely. Saturn is often depicted holding a scythe, an instrument which suggests among other things, agriculture. Lewis has already assigned the notion of growing things to Venus, though. Biblical references to the true God holding a sickle remind us that the scythe is used at the end of the agricultural cycle: at the time of reaping, the time of death. Having trouble associating the Way, the Truth, and the Life with death? Remember who holds the keys to Hell and to Death! And remember that for the faithful, death is but a transition; we might even say death is a Door. Honor Christ who holds both your life and your death in his hands. And thank the good Lord for all who work in professions of dissolution, decay, and closure. Buildings need great expertise when it’s time for them to be demolished. Bodies need tender, skilled, respectful care when they lie lifeless. And the trashman? The trashman should be paid four times what he makes now! Christ is the Alpha and Omega, the Beginning and the End. Learn from Him to bring everything to its fitting end at the proper time.

A few short blog posts won’t convince you of Michael Ward’s theory. But if you’re on the verge of believing, consider that Saturn is often equated with the Greek Cronos, the god of time, and then think of Father Time waking up to signal the end of all things in The Last Battle. If you need more convincing, read one of Ward’s books. If, on the other hand, you’re sure you can’t be convinced of this theory . . . well, I don’t think you would have read this far if you’re that sure.

Here Comes the Sun

When I first read The Chronicles of Narnia fifty years ago, most of my friends who were fellow fans of the series called The Voyage of the Dawn Treader their favorite of the seven books. I didn’t understand; it was my least favorite. People sailing around finding weird islands with no thematic connection? My 16-year-old self wasn’t having it. (The 2010 film’s attempt to provide an overarching plot with its green mist and seven swords didn’t work and, while it presumed to save Narnia the land, brought about the tragic downfall of Narnia the movie franchise.)

During my most recent rereading of the book, though, I kept thinking that I couldn’t see how I had missed its now very obvious meanings and messages. Even without Michael Ward’s Planet Narnia theory, couldn’t I have seen the unifying warp thread of Knowledge (with its inevitable woof of Ignorance) running through the whole web? Making maps of unknown lands is almost the cardinal symbol for learning and knowledge. But I was as blind to it as Lucy was to the Dufflepuds at first. Oh yeah! Seeing what was invisible before: that is actually the leading metaphor for learning and knowledge! Ah! Now I see!

Ward associates this third volume of the series with the Sun (one of the classical “planets,” a word which referred to the bodies that moved with respect to the stars), and surely no one can argue with that claim. The sun shines on the gold in the lake; it disappears in the sea of darkness that drives people mad by making all their dreams come true (ALL their dreams); and its rays edify, encourage, and guide Lucy when she stands in them. If you haven’t read Lewis’s “Meditation in a Toolshed” and you’re the kind of person who would read this post (as I suppose you are!), you should read it. It’s available online. You can probably even listen to it on YouTube, unless the publishers find it and take it down.

OK, you’re back. In that essay, as you know since you just read it, Lewis talks about the difference between seeing a beam of light coming through a crack in the door and then looking along the beam of light at the world outside. He takes the analogy in various directions, but they all have to do with types of knowledge based on how we see things. And Lucy looking along the beam of the Sun is surely Jack Lewis in that toolshed.

The main symbol of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is the Sun, the Sun gives light, and light is a metaphor for knowledge. So what is it that Lucy knows in a new way while standing in the beam of sunlight? Among the things she sees is an albatross that looks like a cross, so even my teenage mind could have figured out that Lucy was learning to know Jesus better. And where ultimately are they all sailing? To Aslan’s land. Every Christian reading this book should also be on a voyage to Aslan’s land where, after seeing in a mirror dimly for so long, we will finally see Him face to face. “Thou hast said, ‘Seek ye my face.’ Thy face, LORD, do I seek.” If thinking about the symbology in the book didn’t get me to understand that the voyage is one of getting to know God better and better, I could have learned it when Aslan explains it in plain English near the end: “There [i.e. in our non-Narnian world] I have another name. You must learn to know me by that name. This was the very reason why you were brought to Narnia, that by knowing me here for a little, you may know me better there.”

I think I probably just needed to live more of my own voyage to understand what Lewis had to say through the Dawn Treader’s voyage about getting to know Aslan better. There is a time and place for everything, a time for Narnia to be at war, and a time for Narnia’s prince to enjoy peace and seek knowledge. But the journey to know God better in this life has been traveled before. In the book the trailblazers are Lord Octesian and Lord Rhoop and . . . oh, I can’t remember them any better than Caspian can. In our world they are the saints, whether that means people whose names get on calendars or family members and mentors who inspire us. Along the way, Caspian, Lucy, Edmund, Reepicheep, and Eustace find some of their forerunners, who have been distracted from pursuing their journeys to the glorious end; but surely we can learn as much from the errors of those who go before us as we do by their successes. And, thank God!, we can also learn from our own errors. On that journey we have times of darkness. We encounter Dufflepudlian mysteries that become clear only slowly. We sometimes have to peel off layers of dragon skin. But with all the wanderings, the overall trajectory is still one of becoming closer to God by knowing Him better and better.

The subtitle of my blog is “one Christian’s journey through literature.” So really my reading plan and my blog are also voyages of the Dawn Treader. See? How did I miss it before?

Jupiter and Mars Are All Right Tonight

In the summer of 2008, I was privileged to attend a three-day seminar with Michael Ward in which he talked about his view of C. S. Lewis’s organizational scheme for the Chronicles of Narnia, a view then recently published in his book Planet Narnia. “I know I sound like a conspiracy theorist,” he said, “but I believe I have discovered the secret to these books, a secret Lewis seems not to have shared with anyone during his lifetime.” Ward was sitting in bed one evening studying Lewis’s Poem “The Planets” when he read, in the section on Jupiter: “Of wrath ended / And woes mended, of winter passed / And guilt forgiven, and good fortune / Jove is master.” He sat up suddenly and thought, “That’s the plot to The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe!” He then started thinking of whether the other six classical planets corresponded to the other six Narnia books.

I highly recommend Ward’s book if you like Lewis’s children’s series. If you don’t care to read a somewhat lengthy rendition of an Oxford dissertation, you could also try Ward’s condensation of the ideas in The Narnia Code, which was, I believe, written for use in adult Sunday School classes. In any case, I have used it in adult Sunday School classes.

In his capacity of professor of Renaissance literature, Lewis had professional interest in the symbolic history of the planets. As a lay theologian, he regarded the gods associated with the planets as conveying partial truth. As his friend J. R. R. Tolkien told him, “Myths woven by us, though they contain error, will also reflect a splintered fragment of the true light.” (Quotation from Humphrey Carpenter’s biography of Tolkien.) So Jupiter’s qualities are only some of the qualities of Jesus Christ, and insofar as we can see Jupiter, the king of winter passed and guilt forgiven, as worthy of respect, we must realize that Christ is worthy of honor and praise for this and for so much more.

Prince Caspian is heavily influenced by the myths of Mars. There’s more war in that book than in any of the other six. We are meant to lionize (pun very much intended) Caspian and all the Old Narnians who win the battles in that book; in doing so, we honor the image of Mars in them. So, too, we honor Christ as the Lord of Hosts with a sword in his mouth. 

Mars’s martial qualities are well known to all of us. After all, those "martial" qualities are named after him. Much more surprising to me is Lewis’s indication in his poem of a connection between Mars and trees. However essential that aspect might or might not be to the common understanding of the myth of Mars, Lewis notes it, and sure enough, Prince Caspian is full of woods and forests.

Michael Ward has convinced most people in the world of Lewis scholarship of the validity of his theory. He has thoroughly convinced me, and he has certainly changed the way I read and think about those books. Essentially, Ward says that rather than waiting for Aslan to show up, we are to recognize Christ’s presence on every page.

In turn, my altered thinking about Lewis’s Narnia books has improved the way I think of Jesus. Seeing Him as the synthesis of seven mighty mythical gods (and more!) make me more able to see Him at a glance as grander and more awesome than I normally do. And understanding more about Lewis’s desire to have Aslan permeate the very atmosphere of each of the Narnia books helps me to see Christ permeating our world. In other words, Michael Ward has helped me, in biblical terms, to magnify the Lord.

I’ve also come to see more clearly Jesus Christ as an exemplar of all that we might do for a vocation. In what situations or jobs do you follow Jupiter? Are you a government official? A boss? A parent? Any kind of authority figure? King Jesus shows you how to be a righteous leader. In what contexts do you follow Mars? Are you in the military? A police officer? A firefighter? Jesus shows you how to be courageous. Or turning to the relationship between Mars and trees and carpentry, do you craft or build anything? Jesus shows you in the wonders of the physical world how to craft with loving attention to detail.

Enough for now. More in a few days about the other books in the series.