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Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C. S. Lewis, by Michael Ward
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For over half a century, scholars have laboured to show that C. S. Lewis's famed but apparently disorganised Chronicles of Narnia have an underlying symbolic coherence, pointing to such possible unifying themes as the seven sacraments, the seven deadly sins, and the seven books of Spenser's Faerie Queene. None of these explanations has won general acceptance and the structure of Narnia's symbolism has remained a mystery. Michael Ward has finally solved the enigma. In Planet Narnia he demonstrates that medieval cosmology, a subject which fascinated Lewis throughout his life, provides the imaginative key to the seven novels. Drawing on the whole range of Lewis's writings (including previously unpublished drafts of the Chronicles), Ward reveals how the Narnia stories were designed to express the characteristics of the seven medieval planets - - Jupiter, Mars, Sol, Luna, Mercury, Venus, and Saturn - - planets which Lewis described as "spiritual symbols of permanent value" and "especially worthwhile in our own generation". Using these seven symbols, Lewis secretly constructed the Chronicles so that in each book the plot-line, the ornamental details, and, most important, the portrayal of the Christ-figure of Aslan, all serve to communicate the governing planetary personality. The cosmological theme of each Chronicle is what Lewis called 'the kappa element in romance', the atmospheric essence of a story, everywhere present but nowhere explicit. The reader inhabits this atmosphere and thus imaginatively gains connaître knowledge of the spiritual character which the tale was created to embody. Planet Narnia is a ground-breaking study that will provoke a major revaluation not only of the Chronicles, but of Lewis's whole literary and theological outlook. Ward uncovers a much subtler writer and thinker than has previously been recognized, whose central interests were hiddenness, immanence, and knowledge by acquaintance.
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Product details
Paperback: 348 pages
Publisher: Oxford University Press; 1 edition (May 12, 2010)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 019973870X
ISBN-13: 978-0199738700
Product Dimensions:
9.2 x 1.1 x 6.1 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review:
4.6 out of 5 stars
74 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
#137,901 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
On its face, the Chronicles of Narnia is a fairy tale about children who find their way into a magical land with a god-like lion. Secondarily, there are the underlying Christian themes of sacrificial death and resurrection in the first volume, and the second coming in the last. Between these two volumes, the Christian themes are less dominant, so is there yet a third reading that provides a golden thread of coherence among all seven volumes? The author makes the case that the secret key to the Chronicles lies in medieval astrology and pagan mythology. Specifically, the seven volumes were intended by Lewis to each convey a sense of one of the seven deities represented by the seven planets of classical astrology, namely (in order of appearance): Jupiter, Mars, Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus and Saturn.As most other reviews have found, the author’s evidence and argument are persuasive on the whole. But what is the import of this hidden symbolism? On the one hand, the book can come across as a long but trivial easter-egg hunt: Mars is associated with war, trees, iron and woodpeckers, and oh look, in Prince Caspian the children enter Narnia in a thick forest to fight in a war, there are iron bars on a wooden chest in an armory, woodland dryads battle the Telmarines, and arrows striking trees sound like a woodpecker! And so on and so forth.But Lewis had more in mind than merely “conducting a playful literary experiment, curious to know whether his readers would recognize the Chronicles symbolic structure.†(234). Rather, Lewis was determined to communicate eternal truths through symbols and fairy tale - rather than reason and apologetics - in the aftermath of his humiliating loss in a public debate to a young philosophy student who had openly challenged his argument against naturalism in his apologetical work Miracles, A Preliminary Study. (215.) According to the author, Lewis recast his philosophical arguments from Miracles into imaginative story-telling and symbolism in the Chronicles, thereby pre-empting further rational critique. (219)Lewis was inclined toward the Jungian theory that universal archetypes are present in the human subconscious, and these primordial presences could be invoked through symbols that represented the type. (229) Citing Jung, Lewis stated, “Fairy tale liberates Archetypes which dwell in the collective unconscious.†(229.) Consequently, it does not matter that the modern reader lacks training in the classics so as to associate fighting and iron and trees with Mars because the same inner urgings that led the ancients to Ares continue to operate in modern man below the level of consciousness.If you can steep a man’s imagination with enough battles, trees, iron and woodpeckers, you can tap the same vein that caused his ancestors to worship the god of war. Likewise, get someone immersed in a story with “conjugating†beasts, “climactic†scenes, “orgasmic†moments, comely women and copper, and eventually their inner being will be tingling for Venus, the goddess of erotic desire. (179-182). According to the author, Lewis’s skill at secretly arousing the planetary archetypes universally present within all humans accounts for the Chronicles’ broad-based popularity. (230-231.)The main drawback here is that the author simply accepts the underlying assumption that there really is a collective unconscious of primordial archetypes that symbolically manifest through human imagination in the form of ancient myths and fairy tales. If that foundation itself is but a cleverly devised myth - and the author offers nothing to prove otherwise - then the whole edifice collapses into a “playful literary experiment.†An amusement, and little more.The author devotes significant space to the question of why Lewis never mentioned his grand unifying theory of the Chronicles; but that’s a no-brainer. If your goal is to send secret coded messages to a person’s subconscious via hidden symbols in a fairy tale, the last thing you’d want to do is tell them about it. That would be akin to an illusionist first explaining his trick to an audience and then trying to fool them with it. If someone reads in The Magician’s Nephew that Fledge’s wings were copper-color and immediately thinks, “There he goes again with those planetary archetypes,†they are not likely to then subconsciously connect with their inner Aphrodite. The whole point of the symbolist’s art is to by-pass the rational mind and directly trigger metaphysical intuition. But once the mind is alerted to the ruse, its then near impossible to “steal past the watchful dragons.â€All this pagan idolatry wouldn’t sit well with the multitudes of Christians who love the Chronicles and whom the author, presumably, would like to buy this book, so the author is quick to point out that the seven gods of mythology subconsciously adored by the Chronicles’ readers are none other than different facets of the Christ-figure Aslan. Though the female sex-goddess Venus presents something of a poser for this schema, “the answer we suggest is that Aslan is feminized†in The Magician’s Nephew. (185.) But this maneuver then begs the question of whether the intent here is to conform the planetary archetypes to Christ, or Christ to the planetary archetypes. In Jungian terms, the question reduces to: is Christ a primordial unconscious archetype? The Jungian answer is yes, and the author's thesis is aligned with this response.
"Planet Narnia" made me enjoy the Narnia tales ten times as much as I had before and opened up an entire cosmos of symbolism for future stories. Dr. Ward shows how the medieval understanding of the planets (which hold “permanent value as spiritual symbols") is a major driving force behind The Chronicles of Narnia. We have the complete set: Jupiter (The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe), Mars (Prince Caspian), the sun (The Voyage of the Dawn Treader), the moon (The Silver Chair), Mercury (The Horse and His Boy), Venus (The Magician’s Nephew), Saturn (The Last Battle). But the symbolism isn’t true for Narnia alone. Ward demonstrates how it is also behind much of Lewis’ poetry and the space trilogy, especially "That Hideous Strength." Thus, behind much of Lewis’ fictional work is the “discarded image†he loved so well.Skeptics will insist that the branches here are just too skinny, but in Ward’s defense is Lewis himself: "Supposing you had before you a manuscript of some great work, either a symphony or a novel. There then comes to you a person, saying, 'Here is a new bit of the manuscript that I found; it is the central passage of that symphony, or the central chapter of that novel. The text is incomplete without it. I have got the missing passage which is really the center of the whole work.' The only thing you could do would be to put this new piece of the manuscript in that central position, and then see how it reacted on the whole of the rest of the work. If it constantly brought out new meanings from the whole of the rest of the work, if it made you notice things in the rest of the work which you had not noticed before, then I think you would decide that it was authentic. On the other hand, if it failed to do that, then, however attractive it was in itself, you would reject it" (Grand Miracle)."Planet Narnia" reveals the center of the Narnian symphony, and suddenly all the sounds not only make more sense, but are more beautiful than ever.
Michael Ward has written a deep analysis of the writings of C.S. Lewis. Of particular interest to me was his alignment of the seven chronicles of Narnia with the seven planets of the medieval cosmology. I could have wished he had included some tables lining everything up on a page or two, but perhaps he wanted the reader to do that. In addition to the Chronicles of Narnia, Ward has also shown how Lewis made use of the medieval cosmology in his poem "The Planets" and also in the so called space trilogy. This is a fascinating overview of Lewis' writings and a helpful frame work to organize them. Although many attempts have been made to discover the organizing principle of the Chronicles, I really think that Ward has hit the nail on the head. His careful and comprehensive explanation throughout this book of how the planets and the gods associated with them have been used to guide the material of each chronicle and to display the Creator of all planets is not only convincing, but also enlightening.
While I do think a fan of C.S. Lewis can pick this up and read it, you have to understand that this was written by an Oxford Professor. It reads like it, so this is NOT for light reading. If that's what you're looking for... great. This book is excellent; filled with details that you haven't read anywhere else. That being said, this is very much a book for the educated, so if you're intimidated by that, skip it. For an alternative, head over to YouTube and watch Dr. Ryan Reeves lecture where he gives an overview of what Dr. Michael Ward has written about.
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