Transcript
Well, I really, I'm really happy to be here again.
I've got, I don't know where Chris got that idea about me being in the radical dormitory
at Berkeley.
That's not quite true.
It was a co-op.
The University, I'll get this, Arch Davis gave him all this information.
It's all apocryphal.
But it was, I just lived in an ordinary student dormitory at Berkeley, just a typical dormitory
student dormitory at Berkeley.
But it is true that it was part of the co-op system at Berkeley and I was a president
of that hall in my senior year, but it was in that hall that I was invited to my first
Bible study group and through which I really, my Christian faith was clarified, too.
So it was radical in all different kinds of ways, I think.
But it is true that we did, we had the distinction at Berkeley of being the only dormitory
at the University of California that was on the House on American Activities Committee
list.
And so it is, that is true, but it was all a great misunderstanding.
And we got it cleared up and we became a perfectly legitimate, down-to-earth dormitory.
But then I came to Princeton Seminary and began a long-standing relationship with the
Princeton University, too.
When I was a student at the Seminary, I had a chance to be a part of some small Bible
study groups right here on this campus.
And that began a series of friendships with students here at Princeton University that
many of those students, of course, have left these IV walls and have gone on all different
kinds of places.
But I've sort of had a special interest in this school in my seminary, too, all the
years since.
Last year, I did two talks for CS Lewis Society on CS Lewis.
Let me just tell you some of you may have been here last year, and I'll give you the
titles so you can see where tonight fits in.
Last year, I did, hey, do they use that to hit students with that they get too close
to the professor?
Last year, I did a talk on what was entitled CS Lewis as a 20th century Christian disciple
and endeavored to just sort of do a whirlwind tour through his life and his theology, sort
of seeing what he believed in his convictions.
And then the second night, I narrowed and gave a talk on CS Lewis as a Christian apologist.
And tried to first define what apologetics was and what would be the kind of intellectual
apologetics that Lewis expressed in his life and in his work.
And this year, Chris called me on the phone and said, would you come and do another talk
on CS Lewis?
And so I thought, and he gave me some suggestions that he thought might be interesting.
And so tonight, I'm going to even hone in a little more and take a look at CS Lewis as
a fantasy story writer and reflect on the theology that Lewis expressed in his fantasy
stories and maybe give you some appreciation of how he got where he was, do a little
bit of reviewing, if you don't mind, we have to cross paths a little bit with the lectures
last year.
I hope you don't mind.
You probably forgot what I said last year anyway, if you were here.
But at least maybe I stirred you up to read Lewis and that's the most important thing
anyway, is to introduce you to a writer and get you to form a friendship with the
writer.
And I hope I can do that again tonight.
But I'd like to cross the road a little bit with some of the things we did last year
to give you the feel for Lewis, to give you some sort of feeling for his life.
And what made him tick so that you could understand why he, in the 1950s, decided he wanted
to relax and write children's stories and to understand a little bit of what he tried
to achieve in those seven stories he wrote, which really are quite uncanny stories.
While Lewis was born in 1898, November 29th, and he had an older brother, Warren Lewis,
who was three years older, and the first ten years of Lewis's life were idyllic and happy
years.
He had a very expansive and generous mother and someone austere father, severe even,
a loose father.
But his mother made up for it, and those for early years were warm and supportive years.
Then his mother died, a very terrible death, a whole year of illness, everybody whispering
around this young, nine-year-old boy, aware that something was really wrong, and then
finally the news that his mother had died.
In fact, it was such a crushing blow to the family that the father tried to keep everything
in the house sort of the way it was when the mother died.
The calendar was never even changed.
That was on the wall.
It was that kind of crushing blow, and it was very crushing for Lewis, in many ways, because
after the death of his mother, his father sent both Lewis and his brother off to prep schools
in England.
They were living in Belfast at that time, and Lewis went off to these prep schools that
he despised.
He hated the three years in British, what they call public schools, but they were prep
schools.
We would call them, and they were very harsh, lean years in his life.
Finally, when he was in high school years, he pled with his father to take him out, and
so his father sent him to a man named Kilpatrick, who was his tutor and tutored Lewis.
And it was Kilpatrick, an atheist, by the way, a very strong, wild atheist who drove
all the old Presbyterian, Lewis had been raised as a Presbyterian, all the Presbyterian
faith that he might have had drove it out, Lewis became himself an atheist, but he learned
how to think.
And this man, Kilpatrick, made a tremendous impression upon Lewis.
He adored the man, and Lewis became, I think, a really great apologist later, and quick
with it, thinker evidently in debate, very few could out-debate Lewis, because Kilpatrick
had honed him to a sharp edge.
Then he went to the World War I, and was wounded in France, came back, was sort of further
estranged from his father.
During those eight months, he was in a hospital in England.
He pled with his father to come over and see him.
He apologized to his father, said, I've been a terrible son, I've been an awful son,
but now I apologize, I want to be a good son.
Please come over and see me, his father never came.
Would you believe it?
That's all he had to do was take a ferry across from Northern Ireland, but he never came.
He was always too busy with his lawyer, and he had his practice, and all the things he
was into.
And then that strangeness sort of went even further.
Lewis then went to Oxford, and he was a brilliant scholar.
He took honors in three different subjects, but decided to zero in on literature, medieval
literature.
Finally, after completing his studies at Oxford, he was put on the faculty as a tutor.
And he was a tutor at Oxford in English, and read in English, medieval literature, from
1925 up till 54, when he left to become the professor of medieval literature at Cambridge.
And as he left Oxford, he was also a professor at Oxford too.
So he had a very distinguished career, he died in 1963.
And he died the same day that John F. Kennedy was assassinated.
So the New York Times carried both stories, one in a small little notice in the obituary
page and the other in the front page of the death of two really great people.
Lewis, from his youth on, had a fascination with Norse folk tales.
He called them the northern tales.
He loved them.
He had a friend named Arthur Greaves, and he wrote letters to up until the day, virtually,
but the week before he died.
And by the way, all that Arthur Greaves literature, the letters Lewis wrote to Arthur Greaves are
all of the Wheaton collection in Wheaton, Illinois.
All his private papers were will there.
And that's a fascinating collection of letters.
I read a lot of them myself.
They're not published yet, but someday they will be published probably, the Arthur Greaves
collection.
Because they had a great love affair, these two young fellows, with the Norse stories and
fantasy stories.
And Lewis developed that to fascination, his brother, Warren, who was his great friend.
It really his best friend, his whole life, was Warren Lewis, his older brother.
In fact, they lived together most of their adult life.
And Warren and he created an entire empire as children in the attic of their house in
Belfast.
And that was called the Boxing Empire.
Warren had all of his generals.
He loved military history.
In fact, he became quite an authority in military history.
He wrote about four books himself on British history, military history.
And the CS, Lewis, had all of his heroes were all mice and animals that talked.
Now you can get ready for the chronicles of Narnia because Lewis kept that love affair
up with talking animals when he was an adult, writing the children's stories.
So they had this Boxing Empire, Lewis drew maps.
If any of you were into dungeons and dragons, it's very similar.
He had his dungeons and he had his mice going through all the antics.
And much of that's been lost, but some of those original drawings of Lewis still exist.
Then when he went to Oxford, he met an amazing man named J.R.R. Tolkien.
They became very close friends.
In fact, Lewis dedicated his first great book, Screwtap Letters to Tolkien, and Tolkien
dedicated his great work, Lord of the Rings trilogy, to Lewis.
They were very good friends.
Tolkien, he even was into it much more than Lewis was.
Tolkien was his own Catholic Christian, and Lewis was an atheist.
But Tolkien loved Norse fairy tales, too.
And Tolkien was teaching in the theology, and Lewis was teaching in medieval literature
at Oxford.
Tolkien had learned.
He was so devoted to these folk tales that he learned Icelandic language.
Now this will give you a little respect for Tolkien.
You can appreciate why he would invent his own language for Middle-Earth and the whole
Lord of the Rings trilogy.
He learned Icelandic, so he could read those Icelandic folk tales in the original.
And he had what he called the Berliners group, a little Dungeons and Dragons group, my sons
and Dungeons and Dragons, so I can tell you all about that.
I see somebody went like that over here.
But he had his own little group that met, and they had to learn Icelandic language to
come to Tolkien's group and Tolkien taught them Icelandic and then read them folk tales
in Icelandic.
Lewis got into that.
Would you believe it?
Lewis was very brilliant in languages.
He learned Icelandic so that he could read these folk tales.
And they went through all these Icelandic folk tales that Tolkien read, and once a man
came and had a crib sheet and Tolkien found out and kicked him out of the group, he had
a little English translation hidden under the table.
And that's how strict Tolkien was about language.
And he kicked his fellow out.
But Lewis went to that, and he went to these meetings.
They were held once every other week and then finally when they started running out of
folk tales about every three, four weeks, then finally every month.
And Tolkien and Lewis became very dear friends.
And they had this love affair with these stories.
The reason I'm telling you all that is it played a key role in the conversion of CS Lewis.
Around 1930, his brother and his brother, it's interesting, both his brother who became
his journey back to Christian faith and Lewis's journey to Christian faith went on sort of
parallel paths, but separately at this time, his brother was in the military at this time.
But Lewis first became a theist.
If you want to read all this, you can read it in his books, Surprised by Joy, which is
his autobiography.
He first became a theist and believed finally in the existence of God.
He said I was the most unwilling convert in all of England, but he finally agreed to believe
in the existence of God.
But he could not believe in the existence of Jesus Christ or the relevance of Jesus Christ.
And finally in 1931, in a famous walk that Tolkien and another man named Dyson and Lewis
took at Oxford out in the walkway that Lewis took walks all the time and he loved these
walks.
And he and Tolkien, they had, he and Tolkien had beer together every Tuesday morning for
about 30 years of their life.
And then they had a meeting every Thursday night for about 20 years of their life.
That was the meeting called the Inklings.
And they took many walks at night.
And this was one walk that he and Tolkien went on in which Lewis just could not believe,
could not see the significance of Jesus Christ.
And then Tolkien said to him, and by the way, if you want to see the Tolkien's logic in
this little reasoning that Tolkien developed, you can read it in an article he wrote later
in a book called Essays to Charles Williams, Tolkien's marvellous essay on mythology and
myth stories.
Tolkien said to Lewis, he said, what you've got to see is that Christ is like a myth.
It's like a story.
It's like a fantasy story.
Like we love in our Norse fantasies.
And he said to Lewis, that's what you've got to see Christ as.
He's like the eucotastrophe, you know, that's the phrase that Tolkien invented.
The good catastrophe that you have in folk stories.
It's the same thing.
And then he said to Lewis, but the only difference is, it's true, it's true.
It's a true eucotastrophe.
It's just like we've studied in these Icelandic myths, but it's the true myth.
It is the the eucotastrophe.
It is the good catastrophe.
And Lewis went back to his apartment that night.
He continued talking with Dyson till four in the morning, and he was totally shaken.
He had never seen the relevance, and now he was totally shaken by that talk with J.R.
Tolkien.
And then if you read Surprise by Joy, you know that about three or four days later, he went
in his brother's side car, in his brother's motorcycle, and they rode to Wipsonade Zoo.
And Lewis says in Surprise by Joy, so he says, at the beginning of the ride, I did not
believe in the deity of Jesus Christ.
At the end of the ride, I believed in the deity of Jesus Christ.
There was nothing, there was no great emergency on the ride either.
It was not like the Damascus road.
They saw, they saw no flashes of light.
And he said, it was just a quiet experience.
He said, it was not so much that I had an emotional experience.
It was more like a person who woke up, that's to quote Lewis.
I just woke up, and I realized it's true.
And you know from that date on 1931, Lewis never doubted the central fact of the Christian
faith, the deity of Jesus Christ.
That was his great discovery.
It changed, shattered, altered, radically his whole life.
Well, what do you do if you're a man of literature and you've had that kind of shattering experience?
Well, you write a book.
And Lewis did, he wrote a book, he worked on it, he went to work on it immediately.
Tolkien warned him not to do that.
Tolkien was much more conservative than Lewis.
And in fact, Tolkien was so conservative, I'll just do a little parenthesis on Tolkien.
He's another one of my heroes.
But Tolkien was working on a set of stories, and he wouldn't let anyone read his stories
except C.S. Lewis.
And these were stories about some orcs and hobbits that he was creating.
And Lewis read these stories and absolutely went to ecstasy over them.
In fact, Lewis even wrote critiques of all the poems or stories in all the language.
And Tolkien wrote the Silmarillion, read it all to Lewis, he wrote the Silmarillion first.
Then he wrote the hobbits, and then he wrote his trilogy, Lord of the Rings, he worked
on it for 25-30 years, and it was Lewis that convinced him to publish it.
He owes the world, owes a great debt to C.S. Lewis, for publishing the Lord of the Rings.
And Tolkien was so interior, he didn't read them to anybody, but to Lewis.
And Lewis was the one who convinced him that they simply had to be published.
But Lewis was different.
He became a Christian in 1931, decided that Jesus Christ was Lord, and he immediately started
to write a book, and he wrote a book that turned out to be a disaster for C.S. Lewis.
He paid a heavy price for that book, it's called Pilgrim's Regress.
It's a South Morric book.
Everybody hated it, the critics hated it.
Lewis worked very hard on it, he worked a whole year and a half on that book, he was proud of it.
And the faculty at Oxford were furious because they saw themselves all the way through that book.
And it's true.
His heroes were too heroic, and his villains were too villainous.
He has one villain at that time, he hated T.S. Eliot, and he has one villain that's so obviously T.S. Eliot
that it's just transparent, and yet Lewis published that book in which he shared his faith.
And unfortunately, it was a disaster.
And many people feel that Lewis was punished academically at Oxford, all his career there because he wrote that book.
And so after that, he didn't write any more religious books for nine years.
He learned his lesson.
He poured himself then into his academic work, waited in season, and mellowed.
And then in 1938, just to quickly give you the rest of his books, 38, he tried his hand one more time in a book.
And he wrote a very, 39, he wrote a very great book called The Problem of Pain, another bold book.
42, he wrote Scrutay Blutters.
45, and then he started to write the space trilogy, his adult novels, and then he started writing all kinds of apologetic works.
The problem of the book called Miracles, and a vast number of apologetic works.
He gave lectures, which were radio talks that became his most famous book, Mir Christianity.
And then in 1950, now he's fully established, he's a world famous figure by now, he's been published millions and millions of his books are being sold.
And by the way, to this date, millions of his books are being sold, you know that everything Lewis wrote is in print right now.
And I read in Newsweek Magazine last year that something like two or three million copies of his books were sold last year in 78.
I mean, just nobody matches him in terms of staying in print.
And so he wrote prolifically, and apologetic works, all kinds of things, essays, articles, he gave a few speeches.
Then in 1950, he wrote a book called Lime, which in Wardrobe.
It was a children's story, and I want to read you a quotation now from Lewis in a letter he wrote to somebody and explaining what he was up to.
He says, I turned to fairy tales, because that seemed the form, which certain ideas and images in my mind seemed to demand.
As a man might turn to fugues, because the musical phrases in his head seemed to him, the good, fugal phrases, good, fugal subjects.
When I wrote the Lime, that's Lime, which in Wardrobe is first in a set, I had no notion of writing the others.
Now that's interesting, isn't it?
Those of you who are chronicles, buffs, it's nice to know that.
That's why you shouldn't read an edition's nephew first.
Should read Lime, which in Wardrobe first, so he wrote them.
When I wrote it first, I had no notion of writing the others, but he got carried away, you know.
The first one is not as good as the others, from a literary standpoint.
It's a matter of fact, when he showed Lime, which in Wardrobe to Tolkien, Tolkien thought it was a disaster.
He said it, now he says, you shouldn't publish this, whereas Lewis is saying you should publish the Lord of the Rings trilogy.
And the reason, now this is characteristic of Tolkien, Tolkien did not like the chronicles,
precisely because Lewis had not worked through all the vocabulary and all the language,
as Tolkien had done in Lord of the Rings.
See, Tolkien, it wants everything absolutely precise and tied down.
There are no loose ends in Tolkien.
But Lewis, precisely the genius of Lewis, is lacking in Tolkien,
and the genius of Tolkien's was lacking in Lewis.
That's why they're a marvelous companion.
Tolkien is a, Lewis is a free spirit.
Tolkien is pedantic, it has everything fastened.
There are no loose ends.
And Tolkien is writing like a great symphony.
Lewis is writing little overtures, and they're explosive.
And he doesn't follow through all the things.
They just sort of come in a free form.
And so he wrote Lime, then he wrote the voice of Don Trader.
Actually, he wrote three of them in one year.
And then he started writing them each year,
and the publisher published one year for seven years.
And the first one did not do very well.
But then they began to catch hold.
And of course, in my opinion, I really believe,
if I were going to rate the great things that Lewis wrote,
I think his greatest works would be,
till we have faces, a grief observed,
a scru-taped letters, and the chronicles of Narnian.
I think those are his great words.
And also, allegory of love.
But I think his greatest are these works when he relaxed.
And wasn't trying to do anything for anybody,
but just express some stories he had rattling around his brain.
And so that's what he says.
He goes on to say, writing juveniles, children's stories,
certainly modified my habits of composition.
Thus, A, it imposed a strict limit on vocabulary.
B, it excluded erotic love.
C, it cut down reflective and analytical passages.
D, led me to produce chapters of nearly equal length
for convenience and reading aloud.
So he meant them to be read aloud.
And by the way, they should be read aloud without any comment.
Now, in a minute, I'm going to do some readings from these books.
And I'm going to make comments on them.
But realize this is you asked me to do some theological
reflections on them.
But I believe the story should be read as stories.
And allowed to make their own mark.
Don't interpret them like if you're reading them to kids.
Or if you have a reading group that's going to read the chronicles
or read the Lord of the Rings trilogy, just read them.
Let them hit you with full force.
And I, of fact, I think every good book should be read that way.
And then you can go back and naturally
wonder about the worldview that's represented by the book.
So he said, I made these four things.
And then he says, all these restrictions
did me great good.
That's good.
The fact that he had to write in a form
that the children's story requires.
You know, I have a theory about literature.
And that is when an author writes children's stories,
this is what always happens.
When an author writes children's stories
at first, they're ignored by all the important people.
Tolkien's works were ignored for a long time.
They're ignored by important people.
Like when Mark Twain wrote Huckleberry Finn,
nobody took any note of it in American literature.
So really after Mark Twain had died.
Now all critics of American literature
would call the greatest book of American literature
a children's story, Huckleberry Finn.
It's true.
It's the finest work.
There's nothing in American literature that really matches it.
And it's interesting that Lewis and Tolkien,
and so many great writers, when they relax and write something
for children, here's always a rule of thumb.
The critics will always ignore it.
And in fact, even their loyal readers will ignore it.
Lewis wrote those children's stories,
while I was a student here at Princeton Seminary.
I told everybody over here how loyal I was to Lewis.
I loved CS Lewis.
I said, I read everything Lewis writes.
But I myself didn't read the children's stories
until I had children.
And when I had my own children, first I gave a set
to my daughter as a gift.
And then when I started reading them,
we started reading them aloud in our family.
I discovered those books.
I thought, isn't it nice that CS Lewis is writing things
for children?
I'm so grateful for that.
But I didn't read them myself.
And I believe that that's often where a writer does his greatest
work when he relaxes.
He hasn't had anything to prove.
He's already made his mark.
Lewis is in his 50s when he writes these books.
And he writes these marvelous stories
and shares his worldview.
Someone asked him what he was trying to do in these stories.
Because everyone knows that Lewis was heavily influenced
by George McDonald.
He was heavily influenced by John Bunyan
in Pilgrim's Progress, obviously,
because he wrote Pilgrim's Regress.
And they said, were you writing allegorically?
And Lewis says no.
He said in a letter in 1963, just before he died.
He said, no, I was not writing allegorically.
Instead, I did this.
And here's a direct quote from Lewis.
He said, I said, given a place like Narnia,
I wondered what the Redeemer would be like.
That's what he did in the children's stories.
He wondered what the Redeemer would be like in a place
like Narnia, what evil would be like in a place like Narnia.
And he did what Tolkien says to do.
He created, and you must read Tolkien's great article
in letters to Charles Williams, essays to Charles Williams.
Tolkien explains all of this.
Lewis did what Tolkien and Lewis both did.
They created a world alongside of this real world.
It is a fantasy world.
And you readily see that it is a fantasy world,
like in Dungeons and Dragons.
You have your dungeon, you start going into it,
you know it's a fantasy.
And yet you work things through your worldview,
your philosophy of life.
All these things are being worked through
in this side world.
And it enables you to understand this world you're in
with this world alongside of.
Just like when you go with Huck Finn down the Mississippi River.
With Huck and Joe, you learn a gym.
You really learn about life.
Though you're not on the Mississippi River.
That's a fantasy.
Even Huck himself is a fantasy.
But as you go down that realistic novel
and go down the river, the same thing
as if you watched the children in Narnia,
or you follow Sam Gange and Frodo
through their journey in the Lord of the Rings.
OK.
Now, having said these things and introduced these books to you,
let me reflect upon the theology of these stories.
And move in some directions that we weren't able to move last
year because of time.
Last year we just did a couple of blances into these books.
I'd like to go a little further now into the stories.
Lewis wrote seven stories.
He creates, just for the fun of it,
how many of you here have read one or all of the chronicles?
Well, this is really neat.
I mean, you know what we can really communicate.
The ones who did not raise your hands,
I say to you what I've always said to people
when I meet who haven't read Lord of the Rings
or haven't read who.
How many of you have read the part or all of Lord of the Rings?
See it, you get hooked, you get started.
How many of you read Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs?
Good, that's your next step.
How about Lloyd Alexander?
How many of you read Lloyd Alexander?
Now there's another marvelous American author
that you guys agree who read it,
that they're marvelous.
Children's stories, the Taran Wanderer stories,
very heavily indebted to Lewis and Tolkien too.
I highly recommend those two.
But they do wonders for you.
They're very good for you.
They're good for you psychologically.
Bruno Beatleheim, the psychiatrist says,
if you don't have good fantasies,
you'll create bad fantasies.
And you need good fantasies.
Good fantasies are very healthy for you.
There are a lot of bad ones around too.
But he writes these seven stories.
They start with Lyon Witch and Wardrobe.
And then Prince Caspian, his second one,
Voyage of Dawn Tredder, Silver Chair,
Horsen's Boy, Magician's nephew in the last battle.
There they are.
In each of the stories with the exception of,
well, in each story, really,
the British children are brought into Narnia.
Narnia is this mysterious land that's created just
like Middle Earth, is a mysterious land.
And it doesn't have as many strict rules as Middle Earth.
But that bothered Tolkien.
But still, that's Lewis's sort of,
and that Lewis isn't consistent on how they get in Narnia.
That bug Tolkien too.
He didn't like it.
He'd get in with the ring once.
And then, like in Magician's nephew,
they get in with that ring.
Otherwise, they have to get in,
because Asim calls them in.
But they get into Narnia, and they're called into Narnia,
in this world, which doesn't use up any time in England.
And yet, though generations or vast periods of time
could be going on in Narnia.
So that's sort of the game he plays with his reader.
And the children come into this land,
and all kinds of strange things happen in this world.
And Lewis does wonder what evil would be like.
He wonders what good would be like.
He wonders what all these things would be like in this land.
And so he shares with you his worldview
in the children's stories.
And he does it with a great deal of skill, in my opinion,
and a very light touch.
I think that's the key.
This is a sense of subtly, and the light touch that Lewis
has after he wrote Togum's regress, not there.
But from then on, Lewis has a touch that is really quite
death, quite witty.
He never loses a sense of humor at all.
And that's part of his genius.
All right, if you were to ask this question then,
and this reflect, and just do three reflections tonight,
I want to do three Christian reflections
upon the themes that are present in the Chronicles of Narnia.
All right, the first theme.
We looked at this last year, briefly,
let's look at it again today.
We have to.
There are two things we have to look at.
That we looked at last year.
We'll look at it in a little different way this year.
The first theme, in the Chronicles of Narnia,
Lewis takes seriously the problem of evil,
or the reality of evil.
We just simply have to face up to this,
because Lewis, as Tolkien, as Alexander, Lloyd Alexander,
all great writers, he grapples in a frontal way
with the problem of evil.
Now, this problem of evil is taken seriously
in the full spectrum of evil.
In other words, Lewis does two things in his Chronicles.
One, he grapples with human evil.
And the reality of human evil is faced up
to a whole spectrum of human evil, all the way
from what you might call, they're all sins or guard variety.
But all the sins, all the way from what
you might call the mildest form of sin, which
was just weakness.
It's interesting, isn't it, that in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,
that's the first sin you meet, Tumnus.
He's just weak.
There isn't anything really else you can say about Tumnus,
except that he's weak.
Too quickly, sold out to Jadis.
He's weak.
He's not really evil in that wicked sense.
Like Edmund later is, that's a sin of betrayal.
That's a more intense sin.
But you have all the whole spectrum
is present in the Chronicles.
You can find yourself there.
Like Paul has ethical lists, too.
Paul's great ethical list in Romans,
where you find yourself somewhere.
Whether you're disobedient to parents or ruthless
or an adulterer, you're somewhere in there.
That's why he has a list.
And Lewis does the same thing.
All good writing has to do it.
It's to find you.
Same thing that Dostoevsky does in Brothers Karamazov.
When Dostoevsky gets finished with you,
it's not just the ruthless sins of Dmitri.
It's not just the brutal father of Fyodor,
but it's also the sin of Alyosha, too, who is so easily
disappointed and has fantasized his great friend Zosima.
And then it also has his own sin to cope with.
So all great literature recognizes the ambiguities
of human sin, the complexity of human crisis.
And Lewis does it in the Chronicles.
Just for a moment, look at some of the kinds of evil,
human evil that are faced up to by Lewis.
Really, I think, very accurately.
Tumnus represents just weakness.
Edmund represents betrayal.
Lucy, pride.
You know, Lucy's the hero, really, in Chronicles, the heroine.
And yet, her pride, in the voice of Dawn Treader,
remember in the magic house?
Her pride, and her own form of arrogance.
And then there's Eustace.
What do you do with him, and voyage of Dawn Treader?
He just kind of mean, beastly, kind of tough guy, who
just hurts everybody.
You have the whole thing.
And but Lewis goes even further.
Lewis realizes that human crisis and human sin
is not the whole story.
But he also recognizes that there
is evil at the cosmic level of creation, too.
That's Lewis's grappling with the problem
of cosmic evil, the devil.
And he grapples with that.
In other words, there is an evil, a form of evil that
is more awesome, more terrifying than just the evil
you see in these garden variety examples, as bad as they are
in human sinfulness.
There's also an evil at the higher level of creation,
the spiritual level of creation.
Same thing is Lucas, who borrowed heavily from Lewis,
and that JR Tolkien did in his amazing award-winning
well, at least money-making Star Wars.
He has the same thing, and the greatness of Star Wars
is a film, was that Lucas also captured
that ambiguity and complexity of evil.
You have the evil of the sand people.
They're just ruthless.
You have the evil of weakness in the father and mother
who can't help their nephew.
You have the evil of pride.
You have the evil of the kind of sobbing
Gamora scene in that bar room, all those monsters.
And but you also have Darth Vader, who represents spiritual
evil.
It's a different kind of evil.
You have bureaucratic evil too in Star Wars.
I love that.
All those guys, the nice suits, destroying empires.
But you have even a more complex evil.
And that more complex evil would be the evil of Darth Vader.
And the same thing in Lewis.
There is this awareness of cosmic evil.
And it's represented by Jadis in the line
which in Wardrobe, who is the winter,
she's called the Winter Queen.
It's interesting.
Lewis also represents it by Tash, the god of the Tash band people
in the horse and his boy, and then in the last battle.
But there's a sense of cosmic spiritual evil.
And it's interesting in the Chronicles of Narnia,
how that evil itself, how that evil is presented.
Notice it in the in Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,
the first encounter you have with evil
is the sense of coldness.
He borrowed that from Dante.
Because in Dante's inferno, there's
a sense of ice that surrounds everything
in that portrayal of hell.
You have the sense of coldness.
You have the sense of temptation in Jadis.
Remember, she attempts with Turkish delight.
By the way, that's a real candy in England.
Everybody that ever goes to England
always brings me a package of Turkish delight back.
It's nice to bring to friends you're trying to tempt.
It's not that good either, by the way.
It's a terrible taste.
But it must get a whole of you.
Because evidently, it did with Edmund.
He had one piece and he wandered desperately.
Turkish delight.
Also, Jadis is represented as the destroyer.
She destroys.
Remember, she turns these little animals into stone.
She is a destroyer.
By the way, the word in the New Testament, the word Satan,
literally in Greek means destroyer.
So Lewis captures that.
In fact, in Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,
she wants to destroy Edmund.
She says, I have a right to him because he's committed
treachery.
And that's the ancient magic that I have a right to try.
All traders.
And she wants to destroy him with the dagger.
But the interesting thing about evil and the portrayal
of evil in Lewis is that both the human crisis evil and the
cosmic sense of evil are all limited.
They are boundary.
There is a sense in which the evil is not ultimate.
It's not ultimate evil.
There is a greater boundary beyond them.
In Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Lewis talks about the magic,
the deeper magic that Jadis does not understand.
There is a deeper boundary that Jadis is not aware of.
And that's preserved by Lewis.
All right, secondly, the second theme.
And then I'll try to tie these together with them.
I'm going to give you a couple more comments here and then do
some readings to illustrate these.
The second theme in Lewis is that Lewis believes and
represents in his novels in the existence of ultimate good.
If he portrays the reality of evil in his stories, he also
portrays the existence of ultimate good.
Can I stop with a digression here?
Some people say, you know, in fact, when Lewis first wrote,
oh, I hope I can find a letter here that after he wrote
Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, a lady, he wrote to a person about
that book because it wasn't selling very well.
Darn it, I hope I can, this is in letters from C.S Lewis.
I hope I can find that letter.
I didn't intend to read that, but it really is a good letter
where he says that the book is not selling very well.
Because it's scaring people and it scares people.
But he says, you know, I don't think it scares children.
It just scares adults.
He said, the real children, I wish I could find that quote.
But he says, the real children like it.
And now I can't find that quotation.
But anyway, I gave you the gist of the quotation anyway.
He says, I've written this book and it's not selling very
well and the school teachers are suppressing it.
Stuff like that, he says.
And they're afraid it will scare children.
But he says, you know, I don't think it scares the real
children.
It just scares adults.
Well, now, the interesting thing is that I can't find it.
But people are saying, well, you know, a good story like
this shouldn't portray evil.
Bettelheim, Bidleheim, however you want to pronounce his name,
the psychiatrist who wrote his book called The Uses of Enchantment.
He says that if you don't have a grappling with evil in a fantasy
story, then it isn't psychologically healthy.
He tells a story about a mother reading snow white and seven
dwarfs to her daughter.
And as she gets to the end, she sees in the story that after
snow white, you know, has helped and all
and comes back to life and the elves, no, the little dwarfs.
Then they chase the dwarfs, chase the witch.
And she falls over a cliff.
And the mother sees this in the story.
Oh, my, it's terrible thing to read my daughter.
I don't want to have nightmares.
So the mother anesthesizes the story and says,
and the witch became a nice lady.
And everybody lived happily ever after.
And the daughter says, wasn't the witch
supposed to be thrown over the cliff?
And Bettelheim says, the mother made a great error
because she says, if evil is not decisively defeated,
then the child lives in an unsafe world.
And psychologically, you've done more harm by not letting
the story really grapple with evil and have a real battle
with evil.
So that when Gandalf has a battle with evil at the great gorge,
and when Jadis is grappled with by Aslan,
if you try to blunt those and say, oh, no, you shouldn't
have those in a story, then
even psychologically, the story becomes of no value.
That's Bettelheim's point in his book
that he just wrote a couple years ago.
So Lewis grappled squarely with a reality of evil.
Now, theological reflection, too.
But Lewis believes in the existence of ultimate good.
Now, I want to make a comment here.
Good is presented in his space trilogy
in a profoundly hidden sense, just like it is in Tolkien's
Lord of the Rings.
But in the Chronicles of Narnia, C.S. Lewis
decided to dare to portray the full truth
about ultimate good.
And this is what Lewis did.
He decided to portray ultimate good as really
knowable by mere men and women and as personal.
Believe me, Lewis, it is taking great risks
because the book could really become schmalsy at this point.
It could become really trite.
Tolkien never dared this.
In Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, he keeps good.
There is a sense of real good, but it's always
in profound hiddenness.
Same thing as Lewis did in the Lord in the space trilogy.
There's a profound hiddenness to good.
But in the Chronicles of Narnia, C.S. Lewis dared to do this.
He dared to portray ultimate good as knowable, personal,
concrete, specific, the great golden lion,
that children could run their hands through his hair.
They could ride on his back.
They could see his face.
They could touch him.
And he pulled that off.
He pulled it off in a light touch.
He pulled it off in a way that really holds together
so that his story doesn't lose his meaning.
He doesn't have as long in the stories too much.
He's only in a very little bit.
But yet, Lewis pulled that off
because that's the whole truth about ultimate good.
That's the Christian understanding.
Ultimate good is not a force,
as in Lord is in Star Wars.
Ultimate good, in the Christian sense,
is not just a great theory or spirit of love,
but ultimate good is the word that became flesh.
That's the whole truth.
And Lewis dared to work with that great truth.
Nobody else has really pulled it off.
Now people have tried to do it with stories,
but Lewis pulled it off, in my opinion.
Partly because of his sense of humor,
partly because of the light touch he uses,
partly because he doesn't overdo it.
He preserves the mystery and the hiddenness.
There's a wonderful hiddenness about Aslan.
Aslan is never sentimentally drippy.
Aslan is a wild lion.
Is he safe? No, he's not safe, but he's good.
And Lewis preserves that.
You never feel that comfortable with Aslan.
Every once in a while you see his claws, they're there.
And yet there's a wonder, a mystery
of what he calls surprise by joy.
There's that surprise in Lewis.
And he pulls it off.
And that's the tremendous thing he achieves
that lion, that ultimate good is not just portrayed
in the mysterious sense.
Thank God it is in Tolkien and it is in the space trilogy
by Lewis.
And it is in Lloyd Alexander's book.
But Lewis does even more.
He tries to tell the whole truth.
And this is the radical Christian insight
that ultimate good has made itself known
in the person of Jesus Christ.
And Lewis preserves that.
The Christ figure in his novels is Aslan.
Now, if a third, and then I'll do the readings,
Lewis also has a theology of discipleship.
I just want to make three observations
about his discipleship theology.
One, for Lewis faith, and he has an awful lot
to reflect on faith in his chronicles.
But faith always comes by single steps.
The freedom of the believer is never compromised
by C.S. Lewis in anything he wrote.
And that freedom is always preserved.
In other words, Aslan is never so awesome
that he so scares you that he takes away your freedom.
The reading, remember I did the reading last year
from Silver Chair where Jill meets the Aslan in Silver Chair.
And as awesome as he is, Lewis describes Aslan
as one of the lions in Trafalgar Square.
That's how big he is.
Sitting by that stream.
But yeah, he does not budge from the stream.
He does not maraud or threaten.
And Lucy makes her own steps forward.
She makes her own hard decision.
She drinks of the water herself.
And when he confronts her with her sin,
it's still the light touch.
Where is the boy he fell over the cliff?
Why did he fall over the cliff?
I was showing off.
That's a good answer, human child.
It's neat.
But there's that wonderful sense of in which she makes her own journey.
In Prince Caspian, remember, Lucy sees Aslan first.
And the others only see him later.
But Lucy only first sees him vaguely.
And then a little clearer.
And then a little clearer.
It's step by step.
Lewis preserves that in all the novels.
Secondly, in his discipleship teaching,
in his faith teaching, Lewis has a theology of the church.
No one ever really becomes a believer in Aslan,
or one who belongs to the great lion,
without the help of other people.
So that Lewis is, he breaks from what you might say,
the mystic journey.
You don't really have mysticism.
There's always somebody else.
There's someone else playing a role.
Think about how you meet Aslan.
You meet him because Mr. and Mrs. Beaver tell you about him.
Though they've been called into Indonesia
mysteriously by Aslan.
They don't know it.
But it's Mr. and Mrs. Beaver who tell you about Aslan.
Or you see the mysterious signpost
that the funny little British street lamp growing up in Narnia.
In Congress, it's there.
A little bit like the church never really
quite fits anywhere.
I think that's a symbol of the church in a way.
And there's a lot of wrath and anger in the church, too.
And it's there.
That's how the thing got there.
Somebody threw it that hasn't hit him on the forehead,
went down the ground and grew.
And there it is.
There's a lot of strange things about that sign.
I've wondered what in the world that lamppost
signifies for Lewis.
But for one thing, it's in Congress.
It doesn't quite fit.
And there it is, though, as a marker.
And then there's this statement by Mr. and Mrs. Beaver
that the son of the emperor from beyond the sea
is called you children of Adam and Eve into Indonesia.
And then there's the role the professor plays in line
which in wardrobe.
Oh, don't you love him.
And of course, you've read musician and nephew.
You know who that professor is.
And he's so marvelous.
You remember when they kids come back and they say,
what are we going to do?
And Lucy, she's telling about some strange lamp
where animals talk.
And Edmund says it isn't true.
And the professor says, well, tell me,
what do they teach you in these schools nowadays,
about logic, you know what I'm all these says?
As Lucy usually been honest in the past,
she used to tell the truth.
And she says, yes, she's usually quite truthful.
Well, then why should you doubt her now?
Well, she's saying some strange things.
He says, well, that's all one more reason
maybe you shouldn't doubt her.
Because if she's always been truthful before,
and then finally they say, well, professor,
what do you think we should do?
And I love his line.
If you want to listen on good witnessing,
this is the lesson on witnessing.
Notice he doesn't overdo it.
He doesn't get anybody to throw it and say, are you?
Say, he just says, well, you might try
mining your own business.
That's what the professor says.
Now, he's smart.
He knows that Aslan has to call those children in the Narnia.
He knows that.
And there isn't anything he can do,
but just sort of stand by and be a reference point.
And that's what he is.
And he does.
But notice, he plays a part.
No one becomes a follower of Aslan
without somebody else playing a part.
Voice of Don Tretter is probably the main church novel
in the thing.
That little old rickety ship is probably
the church barely making it.
Hardly ever getting there.
With a mouse on the board, and everybody else,
all the strange crew, and even a dragon
they try to fit on the board and everything.
But that ship, maybe that is like the church.
It's always barely making it, barely surviving,
but it does.
Without these children, one working with the other.
And of course, my favorite combination
is Puddleglum, and Jill and Eustace in Silver Chair.
Puddleglum is the martial world, you know?
He has a web feet like duck.
And he's very pessimistic, extremely gloomy.
And then there's Jill and Eustace who are so optimistic,
but they can't remember anything.
They've got four signs to keep in track,
and they blow most of them.
They can't remember them half the time.
But they are real eager to go and rescue this prince really
on.
And Marsh-wiggle, Puddleglum, is sure nothing
can be done to be helped, and they're probably
all going to die if they go there anyway.
But you know it's marvelous.
You look at that novel and study it closely.
Puddleglum is essential for Jill and Eustace,
because his kind of pessimism and realism, maybe,
sometimes a sour realism.
But Puddleglum is necessary to Jill and Eustace.
And Jill and Eustace are necessary to Puddleglum.
If it were not for Jill and Eustace,
Puddleglum would still be sitting in the swamp,
wondering about where Prince William is.
So they get him to go.
And when they're in the real crunch down
in the underneath world, and the emerald queen has got them
thinking that that little sphere is the real sun.
And there is no real sun out there like they thought.
It's all just a figment of your imagination, she says.
And she's got him, she's humming this melody,
and they're all being hypnotized by the emerald queen, you know.
And Puddleglum is the one who finally takes his foot.
Oh, I love that guy.
He's my favorite character.
And puts a marsh wiggle foot on the fire.
And as C.S. Lewis says, there's nothing
that smells so bad, his burnt marsh wiggle.
And he puts that foot on the fire.
And the real pain and the real smell of that ugly,
terrible smell of burnt marsh wiggle.
And the pain in his foot clears his head.
That's a C.S. Lewis theology.
And he has that in the screw tape letters, too.
That a toothache clears your head.
You don't think about fanciful sorrows
when you've got a real pain, you know.
Like low-grade paranoia that everybody's plotting against me.
He says, you don't feel that way if you have a real toothache.
Tends to clear your head of romantic sorrows.
And so when he has his foot in that fire, his head is cleared.
No longer any romantic sorrows.
And he sees the wicked queen for what she really is.
And she spits out curses at him, and they pull their sword,
and they go after her, well, it's really neat.
Slice her right in half.
It's really a total.
OK, in other words, throughout Lewis's theology,
no one, you don't get the sense of night and shining armor
who goes off and does it all by themselves.
They always need each other.
And then finally, salvation, he has a doctrine of salvation.
He is a doctrine of what Carl Bart would call total help
for total need.
And now, in order to do a couple of readings for you,
so that it isn't just my reflections on Lewis,
but that Lewis reflect on himself,
I want to do a reading from a Voyager Dawn trader,
in which several of these converge together.
In fact, I just think we'll just
have a couple of little readings here.
This is the one I really like.
Eustace is the character in silver chair
that you meet later in the novels.
But now I'm going to introduce you to him
when he's in the first novel he appears,
the Voyager Dawn trader.
Remember, in Voyager Dawn trader, Eustace,
they're all standing, watching the ship on the wall
and the ship, the water actually comes in the room
and they're caught up in this storm,
and they're brought into Narnia.
And Eustace is on the ship, and he hates every minute of it,
sort of like being in church.
If the ship is a kind of symbol of the church in a way,
it's a good one, because he gets terribly seasick,
and the food is lousy, and he doesn't like any of the crew,
and he got this silly mouse, Reaper-cheap,
who doesn't get along with him at all.
And so it's a really funny kind of set of dialogues
that Lewis sets up there, but Eustace is a very bad boy.
He is abrasive.
He is even cruel.
He's keeping it, not only that, he's keeping a diary.
I don't like people, I suspect people
keep diaries anyway.
He's keeping a diary, keeping track of all the wrong things
that everybody's doing in the ship against him.
He's a very bad boy, and he's very resentful for being there,
and he's mean to everyone.
And finally, they land the ship as Rex,
and the mast has fallen over, and they finally land this island.
And the prince, who's in charge of the ship,
who is that, and is it Caspian?
Yeah, the Prince Caspian says, all right,
you go off and do this, and you do this, and you do this,
and Eustace, you go up and look for water for us and all,
and he sends Eustace up on a job.
And Eustace goes up with this island, this exciting.
He goes higher and higher in the island,
and he looks down over the edge of the cliff.
He loses all interest in getting water.
He doesn't want, he's just happy to get away from that ship
and get away from all those people.
He hates Prince Caspian, he hates everybody in that ship.
And he goes up on the mountain, and he looks down,
and there would you believe it.
Eustace is also greedy.
He looks down there, and there's a pile of jewels,
and diamonds, and gold, and all kinds of things.
And he looks into the water, and sees
this beautiful treasure toe.
And then, marvel of marvels, he watches and sees an old dragon
walking to the water, and the dragon just seems to die.
There, and so then he goes down there,
and he's so excited to find these jewels,
so he just stuffs them on his arms and hands.
He shouldn't have done that.
He's going to later work against him.
That's the way greed is.
You start stuffing all the gold all around you,
later it hurts, but you put it on,
and then he feels sleepy.
Now, Lewis says that if he had read children's
north stories, if he'd read these Icelandic myths with Tolkien,
he should have known you never should go to sleep
in a dragon's cave.
But he's feeling very sleepy, so he used this
to go to sleep in a dragon's cave.
Now, here's what's good about fantasy literature.
We're going to give you a little lesson psychologically
on fantasy literature.
What's good about fantasy literature
is that when you have somebody who's bad,
you can make them really bad, and you can turn them into what
they're really acting like.
That's what's good about fantasy literature.
So that's what Lewis is able to do now.
I'll tell you how this happens.
He goes into this, and he falls asleep.
Now, if he had been to Tolkien's meetings
of Icelandic poems, he would never have done this,
but he hadn't been to those meetings.
So he goes into the cave, he falls asleep.
When he wakes up, he has a terrible shock.
He looks out one eye to the right, and he sees a dragon.
He didn't know there was a dragon in that cave.
He looks out his other eye, and he sees another dragon wing.
On the other side, there's two dragons in this cave.
Oh, no.
This is true, so he should never fall asleep.
Well, I know what I'll do.
I'll just make a dash for it, and get out of here
before this dragon gets out.
So he runs like mad, and goes down to the water.
He's panting, gets down there, and looks in the water,
and then he has a real shock.
He discovers that that wasn't a dragon on the right side of it,
and it wasn't a dragon on the left side of it.
Because when he looks in the water, he sees his face.
He's the dragon.
When he fell asleep in the cave, he turned into a dragon.
Because you see, that's the way he is.
He is a dragon.
He's really a dragon.
That's what you know, Garden Variety sins are that way.
When you're a Garden Variety sinner, you're really a dragon.
You're doing horrible things, cruel things.
That's what racism is like, and that's what greed is like,
and that's what all these terrible things
be due to one another.
They're dragon-like.
The only trouble is, in real life, you
can be very handsome, beautiful, dressed well, driving
Cadillac Seville's, and no one would know you're a dragon.
But in fantasy literature, they can turn you into a dragon.
And that's what's so good about fantasy literature.
See, that's what Tolkien's getting at.
You have a world alongside of you, and you can have an arc.
And you can see, evil for what it's really like.
And so that's what Lewis does.
Eustace, who's been beastly, is now a beast.
And he looks in the water.
Now, it's very interesting.
Lewis is profound here.
At first, when Eustace sees, I'm the dragon,
he feels a tremendous surge of power.
It's sort of like what you realize when you're finally
in the mafia.
And you've got the power, and you realize
that everybody's dropped off like flies around you.
You've rubbed everybody out, and now you have this power.
And for a while, you enjoy it.
You get into your Cadillac, and you
roll up the windows, electric windows, and all.
And you really feel powerful.
And somebody comes up, and you push the window down,
and you bark out and order, and then you press the button,
and the window goes up.
That's power.
And so you feel, I'm really something.
And that's what Eustace feels.
And at first, you see, right now his arm doesn't hurt yet
from the goal.
But he starts to fly.
His appetites have changed, too.
He likes raw pigs now, before he likes bacon and things
like that.
Now, being a dragon, his appetites are the more ruthless,
like they really are.
So he eats a few pigs and flies.
He can soar in the sky.
And he's just doing beautifully for about five minutes.
Takes about that long to eat a couple of pigs,
and fly around, and feel his surge of power.
Now he's going to go back and get even with Edmund and Lucy
and all the others.
They can't talk back to me now.
I'm a dragon.
And then two things happen.
Lewis is so profound here.
Two things happen.
One, the ring he put on his arm.
As a little boy, he could put the ring on his arm.
He put a whole bunch of, I guess he put one ring in his arm.
But as a dragon, that ring is now killing him.
He claws at it to try to get it off.
He can't get it off.
The bracelet is pinching him and cutting off his blood supply.
It hurts terribly.
It's a trouble with evil.
Evil finally hurts.
It hurts.
Even the mafia chieftains, it hurts.
But the second thing that happens is he becomes terribly lonely.
And it's the racking loneliness of power
and the pain begins to get to it.
And he begins to repent.
And so Edmund Repentz, meanwhile, back at the ship,
they wonder where has Eustace?
Where's Eustace gone?
They can't find him.
Finally, they see this dragon fly down on the beach.
They're all scared at the dragon.
And tell him he begins to have certain characteristics that
look kind of Eustace like.
And then they see a big tear drop out of his eye.
And they say, well, that's Eustace.
I mean, nods, yes, it's Eustace.
And so then they're very sorry.
And Eustace turns to be a good dragon.
He helps to get a mask for them.
He pulls a mask up, a huge mask.
He helps to refit a mask.
Now they get the ship all fixed and ready to go back out
to sea.
And Eustace has been a really nice dragon.
He's got some food for them and brought it back.
But now the sad moment comes.
The ship's got to go out to sea.
How can they fit this dragon on the ship?
He's as long as the whole ship is.
What are they going to do?
They try to figure can they put him from the bow to the stern
and maybe lean him around the edge?
He would topple the whole ship over.
Or they thought as they go to the open sea,
will he fly along in the air?
While the ship is going along, he would get exhausted.
And everybody's getting so sad.
We're going to have to leave Eustace behind
because he's can't fit in the ship.
And he's turned out to be such a nice dragon.
But we can't stay here because we
have to get on with our mission to find those lost princes
that have gone to the outer islands.
So what are they going to do?
I'll pick the story up at that point.
Well, I'll tell you what happens.
One night, Edmund is walking on the beach.
They're also sad that they're going to leave Eustace
behind the good dragon now.
And long behold, on the beach, who should he see?
But Eustace, a boy again, standing on the beach.
And that's where I'll pick up the story.
And Edmund says, well, Eustace, what are you doing here?
And then how did you get here like this?
And Eustace says, well, I won't tell you
how I became a dragon until I can tell the others
and get it all over with, said Eustace.
By the way, I don't even know it was a dragon.
It was a dragon until I heard you all using the word
when I turned up here the other morning.
But I want to tell you how I stopped being one.
Fire ahead, said Edmund.
Well, last night, I was more miserable than ever.
And that beastly arm ring was hurting like anything.
Is it all right now?
Eustace laughed, a different kind of laugh than Edmund
had ever heard him give before.
And he slipped the bracelet easily off his arm.
There it is, he said, and anyone who likes
it can have it as far as I'm concerned.
Well, as I say, I was lying awake
and wondering what on earth would become of me.
And then, but mind you, it may have been in a dream.
I don't know.
Go on, said Edmund with considerable patience.
Well, anyway, I looked up and I saw
the very last thing I expected, a huge lion coming toward me.
Now, by the way, if you are readers of the Chronicles,
you know that Aslan only appears infrequently in the novels.
And this is one of those infrequent appearances.
He doesn't just hover over the children all the time.
In fact, in the last battle, he never appears.
They think, isn't Aslan going to come?
Isn't he going to come?
And he never appears till the very end.
So you see, that's kind of a sad one.
But only infrequently does he appear.
Here he is appearing.
And Eustace doesn't know anybody about Aslan.
He doesn't know about this line.
Because he has not been a very cooperative, chip writer.
Anyway, I looked up and there was a last thing
I expected, a huge lion coming toward me.
And one queer thing was that there was no moon that night.
Last night, but there was moonlight where the lion was.
So it came nearer and nearer.
I was terribly afraid of it.
You may think that being a dragon, I could have knocked
any lion out easily enough.
But it wasn't that kind of fear.
I wasn't afraid of it eating me.
I was just afraid of it, if you could understand.
Well, it came closer to me.
And I looked straight into my eyes.
And I shut my eyes tight.
But it didn't do any good, because it told me to follow it.
You mean it spoke, said Edmund?
I don't know.
Now that you mentioned it, I don't think it did.
But it told me all the same.
And I knew I'd have to do what it told me,
so I got up and followed it.
And it led me a long way up into the mountains.
And there was always this moonlight over and around the lion,
wherever it went.
So it last came to the top of the mountain I had never seen before.
And on the top of the mountain, there was a garden, trees,
fruit, and everything.
In the middle of it was a well.
I know it was a well, because you could see the water
bubbling up from the bottom of it.
It was a lot bigger than most wells.
It was like a big round bath with marble steps going down
into it.
And the water was so clear, it was as clear as anything.
And I thought I could get in there and bathe.
It would ease the pain of my leg.
But the lion told me that I must undress first.
Mind you, I don't know if it said the words out loud or not.
Now notice, the lion says to use this undress first.
I was just going to say that I couldn't
undress because I didn't have any clothes on.
When I suddenly thought that dragons are
sneaky sort of things and snakes can cast their skins.
Of course, I thought that that's what the lion meant.
So I started scratching myself, and my scales
began coming off all over the place.
And when I scratched a little deeper, instead of just scales
coming off, there was my whole skin
started peeling off beautifully.
Like it does after an illness or like a banana.
In a minute or two, I just stepped out of it.
And I could see it lying there beside me,
looking rather nasty.
It was the most lovely feeling.
So I started to go down to the well for my bat.
But just as I was going to put my foot into the water,
I looked down, and all I saw was hard and rough and wrinkled
and scaly, just as it had been before.
Oh, that's all right.
I said, it means I have another smaller suit
on underneath the first one.
So I'll have to get out of that one, too.
So I scratched and tore again.
And this underskin peeled off beautifully and out I stepped.
And I left it lying beside the other one.
And then I went down to the well for my bat.
Well, exactly the same thing happened again.
And I thought to myself, oh, dear, how many skins
have I got to take off?
For I was longing to bathe my leg.
So I scratched away for the third time
and got out of a third skin, just like the other two.
I stepped out of it.
But as soon as I looked at myself in the water,
I know it had been no good.
Theologically, what's happening to Eustace?
Aslan is asking him to undress.
This is John the Baptist asking the people to repent.
Notice that we're being asked to do something.
He's being asked to help himself.
He's being asked to make the best movie can make.
He's being asked to grapple with his evil, with the dragon.
And he is doing it.
And it's interesting, isn't it, that Aslan is watching him
standing by as he grapples with evil?
This is the dynamics.
This is that freedom dynamic of repentance.
Repentance is never hard.
It's never easy.
It's something you and I have to do.
And so Lewis has got this in his salvation theology.
Then the lion said, in other words, I knew it had been no good.
He said three times, he's taking three different layers off.
Then the lion said, but I don't know if he spoke.
You will have to let me undress you.
I was afraid of his claws.
I can tell you, but I was afraid of his claws, I can tell you.
But I was pretty nearly desperate now.
So I just lay down flat in my back and I let him do it.
The very first tear he made was so deep that I thought
it had gone right into my heart.
But when he began peeling the skin off,
and when he began peeling the skin off,
it hurt worse than anything I had ever felt.
The only thing that made me able to bear it
was just the pleasure of peeling the stuff off.
You know if you've ever picked a scab or a sore place.
It hurts like Billy Ho, but it's so much fun when it's going away.
I know exactly what you mean, said Edmund.
Remember who Edmund was?
Well, he peeled the beastly stuff right off.
Just as I thought I had done myself the other three times,
only they hadn't hurt.
And there it was lying on the grass, only ever so much thicker,
more knobbly looking than the others had been.
And there was I as smooth and soft as a peeled switch
and smaller than I had been.
And then he caught hold of me.
I didn't like that much for I was very tender underneath now
that I had no skin on.
And he threw me into the water.
It smarted like anything, but only for a moment.
And after that, it became perfectly delicious.
And as soon as I started swimming and splashing,
I found that all the pain had gone away from my arm.
And then I saw why I turned into a boy again.
You'd think me simply phony if I told you how I felt
about my own arms.
I know there are no muscle that I've got no muscle,
and pretty moldy compared to caspians.
But I was pretty glad to see them.
After a bit, the lion took me out and dressed me.
Dressed you with his paws, said Edmund.
Well, I don't exactly remember that bit.
But he did somehow or other in new clothes.
The same I got on now, as a matter of fact.
And then suddenly, I'm back here, which
is what makes me wonder if it wasn't a dream.
No, it wasn't a dream, said Edmund.
Why not, said he used to say?
Well, there are the clothes for one thing.
And you've been well undragonned for another.
What do you think it was then, said Eustace?
I think you've seen Aslan, said Edmund.
Now, that's Lewis's portrayal of redemption.
It's his portrayal of repentance.
It's portrayal of so many things, all kind of pull together.
And it's his reflection on Karl Marx's theological phrase,
total help for total need.
Eustace can do so much for himself,
but he cannot do what he needs most for himself.
He cannot be the dragon, turned into a person.
All he was meant to be, that forgiveness.
And you know what's profound, too, when you think about it?
In Lewis, repentance and redemption
doesn't mean that Eustace is turned into an angel
or turned into something into a ghost or anything like that.
He's just turned into a boy.
He's turned into a person.
Lewis is a lot of little profound touches like that
in the Chronicles.
I'm going to stop here with that reading.
And maybe if you have reactions or reflections or comments
you'd like to make, I didn't want to go too much
to be on nine, and I wanted to talk just a little about an hour.
And so I guess I've done that now.
And if you have reflections or questions,
you would want to ask me or comments you'd like to make.
I'd be glad to hang around for a minute and answer them.
But I just wanted to draw these sort of three reflections
together.
Lewis grapples with evil.
He grapples with goodness.
And he grapples with the convergence of the two.
And really, these are three immense theological themes.
They're present in all of the Chronicles.
And you can see them wherever you sort of dip,
wherever you kind of look into the Chronicles,
you see his worldview stream at you, just like you do the same thing
with Tolkien in a little different way,
because Tolkien is more hidden than Lewis.
But that's what's so great about these stories.
Thank you so much for letting me share these thoughts with you tonight
and do this reading, too.
(applause)