Narnia Against the Machine

Deep Magic for the Modern Age

I am happy to share that an essay of mine, “Narnia Against the Machine: Deep Magic for the Modern Age,” has just been published by Front Porch Republic.

This piece may just be my favorite essay I’ve ever written. In it, I write about how prophetic CS Lewis was about the ills of modernity. He addressed these issues in his academic writing, lectures, and essays, but it was when he 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. Looking more deeply at how The Chronicles of Narnia explore the concepts of objective value, chivalry, and Christian mysticism, demonstrates that they are among the most subversive books in the fantasy canon.

Below, you’ll find the introduction to “Narnia Against the Machine: Deep Magic for the Modern Age” and you can read the full essay at Front Porch Republic.

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Narnia Against the Machine: Deep Magic for the Modern Age

More than a century ago, C.S. Lewis witnessed the approach of the Machine. He saw it pockmark the countryside with belching factories, felt it unravel the delicate interplay of time and distance with every ringing telephone, and recognized how it warped the soul of his generation with its hollow ideologies. Lewis had intimate knowledge of such destruction when, on his nineteenth birthday, he was sent into the Machine’s very jaws. Reporting to the front lines of WWI, he discovered the stench of death from the trenches was so potent it could be smelled from miles away. Serving bravely in the Battle of the Somme, Lewis saw his fellow soldiers killed right in front of him and was gravely wounded himself when an exploding shell sent shrapnel into his legs and torso. Left lung punctured, he barely escaped with his life.

The Machine that Lewis witnessed is a term for the operating framework of modernity that obtains across the political spectrum. Its motive forces are as old as humanity, but it has undeniably come into its own in recent centuries. It can be found in the push toward hyper-industrialization, the technological tyranny that governs everyday life, and the philosophical subjectivism that underpins progressive ideology contributing to an epidemic of nihilism and despair. The Machine is premised on scientism and dedicated to the pursuit of “progress” at any cost. Perverting the innate human desire for transcendence, it preaches a philosophy of atomized liberty that purports to free people from limits of any kind, be they tradition, nature, or even the human body itself.

After his convalescence, Lewis returned to Oxford to finish his education. And there, amid the city’s dreaming spires, the war now over, he found the scales had fallen from his eyes. Never again would he believe in modernity’s myth of progress that said the past was exceptionally benighted and that the condition of humanity would go on forever improving. Lewis evaluated his other beliefs and began to recognize that the industrial and scientific revolutions of earlier centuries had profoundly transformed mankind’s felt perception of life. By Lewis’s era this had culminated in a societal-wide transformation: where once the natural world was seen to be saturated with divine meaning, modern people were a historical aberration because they were the first humans in history to view the world as a meaningless machine. Presented as a neutral appraisal of reality, the mentality of the Machine is actually a distinct dogma, one that Lewis recognized as having changed the way people thought about themselves, language, politics, even morality. By the early decades of the twentieth century, this mentality had ripped the sacred from the world, leaving mankind to wander a secular wasteland yearning for something that could no longer be named.

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.

You can read the rest of “Narnia Against the Machine: Deep Magic for the Modern Age,” at Front Porch Republic.