Monday, July 07, 2008

Planet Narnia and Radical Orthodoxy

I'm two chapters from the end of Michael Ward's groundbreaking Planet Narnia, alternately wishing to gobble up the remaining pages and turning them extra slowly to try to make the enjoyment last just a little bit longer. But I can't turn them too slowly...I've got less than two weeks left before it's due back on inter-library-loan!

Reading a book like Ward's makes me wish I was a lot smarter than I am so I could say beautiful and erudite things about his thesis. I don't pretend to understand every fine point of his scholarly argument -- that would mean I understood medieval cosmology (not to mention Spenser, Milton, Shakespeare, and Donne) a lot better than I actually do. The fact that I have grasped as much of it as I have is, I think, a testament to the beauty and cohesiveness of his argument, much more than to any of my feeble attempts to unpack it fully. It's also probably due to the fact that I've inhabited the Narnia stories as long as I have.

I use the word "inhabited" consciously. I've begun to realize that there have been certain books and authors in my life whom I’ve read so often (usually though not always beginning in childhood) that I’ve absorbed their fictional worlds as a sponge soaks in water. You can’t tell where such stories begin and your own stories end, or vice versa, they’re just a part of who you are and they affect the way you see and process the world. Inhabiting such stories is a great joy. They become part of the inner landscape of your heart.

And since Narnia has been part of my inner landscape since I was about ten, I think there’s a good reason why I feel like I can drink deeply from a beautiful book like Ward’s, even though I’m not a trained literary scholar or critic. I’m grateful for the chance to breathe in the delicious and beautiful parts of Ward’s book that I do understand on a deep heart level, and the parts that challenge me are just that – parts that challenge me to go deeper. Among other things, he has almost convinced me that I am ready to tackle Lewis’ book The Discarded Image.

I hope to write more another time about why I feel his argument is so pervasive (and it has to do, in part, with its beauty and cohesiveness) but for now wanted to mention a subsidiary path my mind has taken while reading this book. By happy “coincidence,” I’m also reading the book Heresies and How to Avoid Them: Why It Matters What Christians Believe. This is a collection of essays (which mostly began life as sermons) which happens to be edited by Ben Quash and Michael Ward. I actually stumbled upon the book while doing a library catalog search on Planet Narnia.

Since Ward is one of the editors of the collection, perhaps it’s not surprising that I’m finding some synchronicity in the two books, although they’d appear to have very little in common other than his name on the cover. What struck me anew the other day, as I was going back and forth between them, is just how radical orthodoxy is.

That may sound strange, but I don’t often think about it. The orthodox (classical, historic, creedal) Christian vision is such a deep, deep part of my inner landscape (“by it I see everything else” as Lewis once wrote of Christianity) that I don’t often spend much time reflecting on what it “looks like” or “feels like.” But it is radical, usually far more so than any of the alternative visions we try to come up with on our own, even or especially those that are somehow a watered down or distorted version of the real thing.

As Ben Quash says, charitably and clearly, in the prologue to the Heresies book:

"...just as what we call dirt is often something capable of being useful except for the unfortunate fact that it has turned up in the wrong place – and just as what a mother calls mud on her child’s sports kit while reaching for the washing powder is something a gardener would call soil and grow things in – so heresies often had some good points to make. The problem is they didn’t always do so in the right way or in an appropriate context. Or in a good number of fascinating cases…they just didn’t go far enough. Heretics have often been shy of the full radicalness of orthodox Christianity...all of the first three authors in the book use words like ‘radical,’ ‘amazing’ and ‘shocking’ – and use them of orthodoxy not of heresy. This puts paid to any idea that orthodox belief is some sort of easy way out of intellectual hard work; heresy is more often the easier option."

This rings true. Why are we so surprised, I wonder, at the delightful radicalness of God? And why do we ever think we can “out-wild” the One who made the wild, who called his people through a wilderness?

These thoughts all meshed together for me as I continued to read Planet Narnia. One of the things Ward does so well is to show how many of the supposedly "controversial" issues in Lewis (such as death and sexuality, just to name two) cease to look all that problematic if one is viewing the Chronicles through the lens he proffers. If Lewis really did seek, as Ward persuasively argues he did, to soak each Chronicle in the atmosphere, characteristics and virtues assigned respectively to the seven planets in medieval and renaissance literature – well then, some of the creative and imagistic choices he makes in each book become much clearer and look far more purposeful. This is a relief to all of us who have responded intuitively for years to what feels like a radical, beautiful, cohesive Christian vision in these books, despite the fact that some through the years have charged Lewis with “haphazard” or sloppy creative process. Small wonder that the books continue to speak to so many minds and hearts, preparing people on all sorts of levels to understand (recognize/desire/long for) a God-soaked and God-loved world.

And small wonder that some critics like Pullman, steeped in a worldview diametrically opposed to the Christian worldview, cannot see the forest for the trees when he tries to make his way through Narnia. He hammers away at the parts of Lewis that he sees as anti-life or anti-sexuality, and then Ward comes along and shows the depths and layers of symbolic and imaginative richness that open those scenes up anew and show that they actually pulsate with a far deeper, and yes far more radical embrace of life, and a far more radical rejoicing in embodiment, fruitfulness, and love than a materialistic anti-gospel could ever account for or possibly embrace.

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