Narnia Against the Machine

 From Front Porch Republic:

In contrast to this modern ideology was the medieval worldview Lewis found in the European literature he spent his career studying. As Jason Baxter suggests in The Medieval Mind of C.S. Lewis: How Great Books Shaped a Great Mind, Lewis felt a deep sympathy for the medieval European understanding of the world, in which theology, science, and history existed in a harmonious synthesis that informed mankind’s experience of life itself. This “intellectual atmosphere” meant that for medieval people, the world was enchanted. Richly symbolic, it could be studied to reveal a depth of divine meaning. Science had not yet been reduced to scientism, so investigating the world was a way to learn more about it, not the only way to learn about it. The living world was garlanded with poetry and myth, so that things not only had their material makeup but were understood to call up proper emotional and moral responses. A vast mnemonic device, the medieval world was in conversation with humanity, imparting both wisdom and beauty.

Lewis’s appreciation for this worldview was a cornerstone of his thought, so much so that he considered himself something of a displaced native of the medieval era. In the early decades of the twentieth century, at a time when literary modernism was in fashion and many of his academic peers pursued the overthrow of tradition, Lewis dedicated himself to keeping medieval wisdom alive. He approached the subject from many directions, highlighting its virtues in books, lectures, and sermons, but it was when Lewis guided readers through an enchanted wardrobe into a land of dancing dryads, an evil queen, and a lion who, while not at all safe, was unutterably good, that his quest reached its pinnacle. Under the guise of a winsome fairy tale, the heady atmosphere of Narnia is designed to allow readers to inhabit the medieval worldview.

Today, many of the tastemakers of the fantasy genre have settled into the opinion that Lewis was a writer of moralistic pablum. There have been books published, classes taught, and essays penned on why the genre needs to divest from its problematic roots—including Lewis—and not look back. In truth, however, Lewis was astonishingly prescient when it came to the negative consequences of modernity, and Narnia, with its knights, castles, and dragons, emerged from his understanding of how the medieval worldview could act as a tonic to the ills of the modern age. Looking more deeply at how The Chronicles of Narnia explore the concepts of objective value, chivalry, and Christian mysticism, demonstrates that far from being regressive morality tales, they are among the most subversive books in the fantasy canon. (Read more.)

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