'how lewis lit the way' by michael ward, found in christianity today, 11.2013, p.38f
'all our TRUTH, or all but a few fragments, is won by METAPHOR,
lewis wrote in his essay in his essay 'bluspels and flalansferes'.
similitudes, seeing one thing in terms of another,
finding meanings HERE which correspond with what we want to say THERE,
are for lewis the essence of meaningful thought.
'for me, reason is the natural organ of truth, ..
but imagination is the organ of meaning.
(note: imagination/meaning - reason - truth)
imagination ..is not the cause of truth, but its condition.'
in other words, we don't grasp the meaning of a word or concept
until we have a clear image to connect it with.
for lewis, this is what the imagination is about:
not just the ability to dream up fanciful fables,
but the ability to identify meaning,
to know when we have come upon something truly meaningful.
imagine for a moment that i take my car to the auto mechanic for its annual checkup.
at the end, as i am about to drive away,
i realize i have forgotten to check one thing.
i roll down my window and call over my shoulder to billy, the mechanic:
'is my rear turn signal light working?
he responds, 'yes. no. yes. no. yes. no. yes. no.'
billy's ability to perceive meaning is obviously limited. it's not absent-
he knows the basic meaning of electrical circuits.
he knows that when a light shines a connection has been made,
and when a light goes out a connection has been broken.
but he is lacking the ability to perceive that, in this case,
a steadily flashing light means 'turning' not bad connection'.
billy can see the raw INFORMATION-
light on, light off, light on.
but he cannot discern the correct MEANING of the brute facts.
lewis would say that the problem is a deficit in billy's imagination-
what lewis called 'the organ of meaning'.
billy can see the light and even understand electricity,
but his organ of meaning here is broken.
lewis took this one step further.
for lewis, meaning is 'the antecedent condition of both truth and falsehood'.
in other words, before something can be either true or false,
it must mean something.
even a lie means something and a lie understood as a lie
can be very instructive.
reason, 'the natural organ of truth,'
is our ability to discern true meanings from false meanings.
but the meaning comes first.
so, imagination has to operate BEFORE reason.
reason depends on imagination to supply it with meaningful things
that it can then reason about.
back to billy and the car.
not every flashing light is in fact meaningful.
sometimes loose connections cause light to flicker on and off at random.
we should describe this as nonsensical:
the connections are arbitrary, meaningless.
but if the connections were regular or patterned,
we would likely conclude that they were significant, meaningful.
what kind of meaning would they have?
a true meaning, showing that the driver was about to turn onto a street?
or a false meaning, showing that the driver had forgotten to cancel the signal?
in lewis's view, reason judges between meanings,
helping us to differentiate those meanings that are true from those that are false.
but until we have meaning, we have nothing to reason about.
and for lewis, the way you get to meaning is imagination.
reason can't work without it.
imagination can work without reason, though.
it can produce meanings that are simply 'imaginary'.
meaningful images flood our dreams at night, for example,
but trying to rationally investigate them will get you nowhere.
what does all this teach us about lewis's legacy?
it means that when lewis took up the role of apologist,
he didn't have to choose between rational and imaginative presentations of christianity.
there is just as much imaginatively discerned meaning in 'Miracles' as in 'Perelandra',
but of a different kind, put to a different end.
not only is imagination as necessary as reason in lewis's approach;
in a sense, imagination is more important than reason,
because it comes first.
reason depends on imagination in a way that imagination doesn't depend on reason.
and certainly, in lewis's own path to faith,
imagination cam first.
L's conversion was sparked (humanly speaking)
by a long nighttime conversation with j.r.r. tolkien and hugo dyson.
they were discussing christianity, metaphor and myth.
in a letter to arthur greeves (dated oct. 18,1931), L recounted the conversation.
it is clear that questions of meaning-that is to say, of imagination-were at the heart of it.
at that point, L's problem with christianity was fundamentally imaginative.
'what has been holding me back...
has not been so much a difficulty in believing
as a difficulty in knowing what the doctrine meant, he told greeves.
tolkien and dyson showed him that christian doctrines are not the main thing about christianity.
instead, doctrines are TRANSLATIONS of what God has expressed
in 'a language more adequate: namely
the actual incarnation, crucifixion and resurrection' of Christ.
the primary language of chrisianity is a lived language
-the real, historical, visible, tangible language of
an actual person being born, dying and living again
in a new, ieffably (inexpressibly) transformed way.
when L realized this, he began to understand what christianity meant,
because he was already fascinated (he had been since childhood)
by stories of dying and rising gods.
many ancient mythologies include characters
whose deaths achieve or reveal something on earth:
new life in the crops, for instance, or sunrise or the coming of spring.
L had always found the heart of these pagan stories
'profound and suggestive of meanings beyond my grasp,
even tho' i could not say in cold prose 'what it meant'.
and so l accepted that christianity had to be understood in its own terms
as a story,
before being translated into codified doctrines.
and in this way, he moved from an analytic to a religious perspective of the faith.
ANALYSIS literally means 'loosening up',
while RELIGION means something like 'tying back up'
-religamenting, if you like.
doctrines come from analytical dissection;
they recast the original historical material
into abstract categories.
because of this, doctrines are not nearly as richly meaningful as
the historical material they reflect.
and here is where lewis had a breakthrough.
he understood that the story recounted in the gospels
-rather than the outworking of that story in the epistles
-was the essence of christianity.
christianity was a 'true myth'
(myth, here meaning a story about ultimate things,
not a falsehood),
whereas pagan myths were 'men's myths'.
in paganism, God expressed Himself in a general way
through the images that humans created in order to make sense of the world.
but the story of Christ is 'God's myth'.
God's myth is the story of God revealing Himself through a real, historical life
of a particular man, in a particular time, in a particular place
- Jesus of nazareth, the messiah, crucified under pontius pilate outside jerusalem, circa a.d. 3.
pagan stories were meaningful but not true.
the Christ story is both meaningful and true.
christianity is the true myth, the 'myth become fact,'
as L would come to call it.
a couple of weeks after his conversation with tolkien and dyson,
L became certain that christianity was true.
but it's important to note:
before he could accept the truth of christianity, he had to clear an imaginative hurdle.
his 'organ of meaning' had to be satisfied.
rational assent to christianity cannot occur unless there is
meaningful content to which the higher faculty of reason may assent.
reason can't operate without imagination.
and in this, L, who called himself a 'dinosaur' in his inaugural lecture at cambridge,
is in many ways closer to our postmodern contemporaries
than he was to his own.
our challenge in the post modern christian world is
not so much to prove that christianity is true
as to show that it has meaning,
that it is not gibberish.
unless people see that christian terminology actually makes sense, and is not a foreign language,
they are unlikely to care whether it is also true.
and what is needed is not just dictionary definitions of brief illustrations,
but an immersive story
in which aspects of the christian life can take hold in a person's imagination.
(note: AND LIFE! )
...how can the apologist turn the holistic life of faith
-prayer, fellowship, communion, reading scripture, service of the needy
-into an argument>
it is like mozart trying to prove his musicality
not by writing a symphony,
but by standing gagged at a blackboard using only numbers.
...if faith has to be turned into apologetic words,
it is best to use a story,
as in the synoptic gospels,
or words that are richly resonant and connotative,
like the mighty nouns of john's gospel
(word, light, life, way, water, glory, vine, bread).
these words convey the meaningfulness of faith
much better than do abstract arguments .
this is whay L did not limit himself to propositional, nonfiction apologetics.
his most notable attempt was..the chronicles of narnia..
chad walsh ..wrote,
'in these books where his imagination has full scope,
he presents the christian faith
in a more eloquent and probing way
than ever his more straightforward books of apologetics could.
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