Wandering around the web recently, I found
Prisoner of Narnia, an article by Adam Gopnik in the
New Yorker from 2005. It's about the life of C.S. Lewis, and the enduring attraction of the Narnia books.
The link to the article came from
Daylight Atheism, where they liked this bit:
A startling thing in Lewis's letters to other believers is how much energy and practical advice is dispensed about how to keep your belief going: they are constantly writing to each other about the state of their beliefs, as chronic sinus sufferers might write to each other about the state of their noses. Keep your belief going, no matter what it takes — the thought not occurring that a belief that needs this much work to believe in isn't really a belief but a very strong desire to believe.
It's that belief in belief thing again. This has also come up in my sporadic discussion with
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apdraper2000, where he's asking why I spend so much time blogging about theism. If you want to know what my motivation is, you can
read the thread.
Of course, any Christian worth their salt would be able to you that the reason it's so hard to keep believing in the existence of God as compared to say, believing in the existence of atoms, is because the world is currently a hostile place, where the believer is a
footsoldier in a cosmic battle, facing the flaming arrows of Original Sin, Satan, Dust, the BBC's
blatant bias, the Patriarchy, the Illuminati, New Labour, Zionists, and Communists. Let us waste no more time on the naive idea that if you keep having to shore up your belief in something, it just might be because you're wrong.
Rather, it's the article's insight into Lewis's psyche which is interesting. Gopnik portrays Lewis as a mystic who saw Christianity as a way to keep the magic, the joy of life, real. I was reminded of Jesus in John's gospel, promising
life in all its fullness.
Cardinal Manning agonized over eating too much cake, and was eventually drawn to the Church of Rome to keep himself from doing it again. Lewis didn’t embrace Christianity because he had eaten too much cake; he embraced it because he thought that it would keep the cake coming, that the Anglican Church was God’s own bakery. “The story of Christ is simply a true myth,” he says he discovered that night, “a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened.”
It sounds like Lewis might have agreed with my contention that
scriptural religion is lived fan-fiction, although, of course, he'd have said it was fan-truth.
Gopnik says that the believer and unbeliever can agree on the importance of imagination and stories as a way to reach the parts that both institutional Christianity and a narrow materialism do not reach. The final couple of paragraphs are particularly good, and we learn a lot about Lewis and Tolkien along they way. Definitely worth a read.
Edited: I changed "it just might be because it's bollocks" to "it just might be because you're wrong" after a Christian found the former form offensive. I'm recording that here so it doesn't look like I'm hiding something.
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