Speaker 0 00:00:00 God doesn't make a toy world. When you're playing a video game, you can always press reset. When you're playing with toys, you can just knock everything down and start over again. If the world is real, then our actions have consequences. Eternal consequences, right? When we choose to love God, it matters. And when we choose to hate God, it matters.
Speaker 0 00:00:27 Welcome to the Catholic Theology Show, sponsored by Abe Maria University. I'm your host, Michael dne, and today we are continuing our series into Narnia with CSS Lewis. Today we're gonna be really looking at one of my, I don't know, probably one of the hardest questions, and yet also one of the most meaningful questions we can ask, which is it, is it reasonable to believe in Christianity amid suffering? In some ways, I would say that right? It's, uh, suffering is what, in a way opens up to us the mystery of God, right? Um, it's so obvious in our Christian faith, and yet we sometimes overlook it, that God comes to us amidst his suffering, the suffering of the people of Israel, the suffering of Jesus Christ, and in a way, in our own suffering, uh, Lewis puts in his epigraph to the problem of pain. Quoting George McDonald, the Son of God suffered unto death, not that men might not suffer, but that their sufferings might be like his Lewis will also say at one point, God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks to us, in our conscience, but shouts to us in our pains.
Speaker 0 00:01:56 It is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world. Uh, so we're gonna be looking today at The Magician's Nephew, and the problem of pain, of course, we're not gonna go through all of them, but we're gonna just use them as an occasion to think through this question of suffering. And how do we, how do we find in a way, meaning and purpose in our suffering? How do we find God in our suffering? These are ultimately the questions. Now, one of the things that Lewis wants to say to get started is he says this, I am not arguing that pain is not painful. Pain hurts. That is what the word means. I am only trying to show that the old Christian doctrine of being made perfect through suffering right, is not incredible, being perfect through suffering. That it's not incredible. It's not unbelievable. He says, to prove it palatable or desirable is beyond my design.
Speaker 0 00:03:01 So this is really what Lewis is trying to do, is somehow that we become perfect through suffering, as St. Paul says. Now, when we look at this idea, I also wanna begin with kind of one image, uh, that will, I think, hopefully maybe kind of capture our attention and that we'll return to as well. But at one point in the story of the Magician's nephew Lewis, by the way, had been a young, uh, boy, about 10 years old when his mother died of cancer. She was sick for a while. Uh, there were many doctors in and out of his house, as he would say, and eventually she died. Um, and he describes it in surprise by joy. So Lewis and the Magician's nephew, likewise, has a 10 year old boy named Diggory, whose mother is dying of cancer. And Dige, we won't, I'll talk about the story a little bit later.
Speaker 0 00:03:52 But at one point is before Aslan and in the creation of Narnia, and he, Aslan has asked him to do something to help restore, to make right Narnia. But ultimately, when he says, finally, when he looks at Aslan, when he thought about the great hopes he had for his mother and how they were all dying away, a lump came in his throat and tears in his eyes, and he blurted out, remember, this is the 10 year old boy named Diggory, whose mother is dying of cancer back on Earth in England. But please, please won't you, can't you give me something that will cure mother? Up until then, he had been looking at the lion's great feet and huge claws on them. Now, in his despair, he looked up at its face, right? And, and even there, we see Lewis just so gently but attentively, right?
Speaker 0 00:04:51 Sometimes it's in our absolute despair of trusting in ourselves of our own, the collapse of our own self-sufficiency that we look up. What he saw surprised him as much as anything in his whole life. For the Tawny face was bent down near his own and wonder of wonders, great shining tears stood in the lion's eyes. They were such big, bright tears compared with digger's. Own that for a moment, he felt as if the lion must be really zier than about his mother than he was himself. My son, my son said, Aslan, I know grief is great. Only you and I in this land know that, yet let us be good to one another.
Speaker 0 00:05:47 But this image that Lewis presents to us, which is that in our tears over pain, over loss, over grief, over suffering, when we look up at God, we do not discover a distant God. We discover a God who is weeping with us. Aslan's tears are bigger and brighter and more precious than his own. You think about why did God become incarnate? Well, you might say, to save us from our sins. Why did God become incarnate, right to die on the cross? But we also might say, why did God become incarnate so that we could see his tears, uh, in the gospel of John, the shortest uh, sentence in the Bible, Jesus wept, Jesus wept at the tomb of Lazarus. Jesus wept at the rejection of Israel, of Jerusalem, right? So many different things. So we gotta remember that in our sufferings. Let us turn and look right at the incarnate Lord, who is suffering with us.
Speaker 0 00:06:48 Now in the problem of pain, Lewis's great book, um, that in some ways it was interesting. This was probably one of the books that really solidified him as one of the great apologists of the age. And, uh, this was, uh, written, uh, right at the end of the thirties and probably was the book that made him become the person that the B b C and the British government asked to give these talks during World War ii. But Lewis wants to say this. So he says, what about the problem of pain? And how do we respond to it? How do Christians understand pain and suffering? And he says, of course, just describing his own view as an atheist. And I'll say, this was my view as an atheist when I was a, a young man, was just that if the world is full of suffering and pain, then the evidence is that it's filled with suffering pain all the way down.
Speaker 0 00:07:37 If there were a God who were all powerful and all good, there would not be suffering, but there is suffering. So therefore, there cannot be a God that is all powerful and all good. This is the kind of simple argument of the atheist. Now, what Lewis said though, is after describing this, and even though this was the view he held for, you know, over probably 15 years, uh, he says, in a way, of course, in a certain sense, it's too simple. And because if the world simply were filled with suffering and that was all there were, why then would we find suffering so intolerable? Right? As he puts it, fish do not find water burdensome, um, as he says elsewhere. Uh, right. You know, it's only because we can only recognize that a line is crooked because we have an idea of a straight line.
Speaker 0 00:08:32 So how do we recognize the injustice of the world? Because we have a standard of justice. Now, of course, if a fish did begin to find water intolerable, it might be a sign that the fish was not designed to live in water, but the, the fish was made to become a land animal. So what now Lewis looks at is his very, the frustration that we have with suffering and injustice is actually evidence that we're created for more than this world, right? And as he puts it, in a sense, Christianity actually creates, rather than solves the problem of pain, right? The problem of pain is not something to be solved, it's something to be lived for Pain would be no problem unless side by side with our daily experience of a painful world, we had received what we think of as good assurance, that the ultimate reality is righteous and loving, right?
Speaker 0 00:09:20 So it's not as though Christianity is a philosophical problem to try to call, you know, give an answer. It's just a reality. It's a fact that we have to deal with is that, uh, the apostles went around preaching the good news of the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. So Lewis begins then in trying to respond to this question and help us understand it in two major ways. First, he looks at the philosophical considerations because he wants to show that it's, again, it's not contradictory, right? It's not against reason to hold this view, the Christian view. And then secondly, he's gonna look at history. So the first thing is he looks at the question of, what about divine omnipotence? Because if we're gonna say that a all powerful, all good God can't coexist with suffering, then we want to figure out, well, what exactly is, what does it mean to say God is all good?
Speaker 0 00:10:10 His omnipotence? And Lewis makes this point, and it's very, very powerful, and I think it's something that's often misunderstood. He says, God's omnipotence means the power to do all that is intrinsically possible, not to do the intrinsically impossible. His power does not extend to the absurd, right? Aquinas will say, and it's interesting, this is one of the times where Lewis quotes Aquinas at the beginning of this chapter. Um, Aquinas will say, God cannot change the past, but he can raise the dead, right? How can God not change the past? Well, the past is, it has been, it is. And what is cannot not be, cannot not is right. So whatever is cannot not be at the same time or else. Well, it wouldn't be. So the past is, and therefore it cannot not be. God cannot change the past. Um, right? What he can do is he can raise the dead.
Speaker 0 00:11:07 So God's power, again, it doesn't extend to the absurd. And what Lewis wants to say then, is that people say, uh, fallen angel or angels and human beings, so with persons with intelligence and free will have abused their free will, and have introduced evil into the world. Well, God cannot just make that not be, that's a part of our reality, right? To do that would just be to move creation from a place of reality to simply right, a bad nightmare where the world, uh, doesn't really exist. At one point, uh, he will say in mere Christianity that God doesn't make a toy world. When you're playing a video game, you can always press reset. When you're playing with toys, you can just knock everything down and start over again. If the world is real, then our actions have consequences. Eternal consequences, right? When we choose to love God, it matters.
Speaker 0 00:12:04 And when we choose to hate God, it matters, right? So this is the key thing. Lewis, at one point says, if you try to exclude the possibility of suffering, which the order of nature and the existence of hell of free wills involved, you will find that you have excluded life itself. So we can't try to approach the question of suffering by imagining that God can do the impossible, the absurd. Secondly, what about divine goodness? Well, Lewis says that goodness is not niceness, right? As he puts it one time, and I'm a a grandfather now, so I can relate to this, but he says, we want, in fact, not so much a father in heaven as a grandfather in heaven, a sinou benevolence who as they say, like to see the young people enjoying themselves, right? God's goodness, as Lewis will say, is actually a transformative goodness, a goodness that wants to make creatures better.
Speaker 0 00:12:59 Uh, Lewis will give the example, right? If you take a wild dog and you, or you know, a dog that's, um, you, you rescue a dog from the wild, you're going to bathe it. You're gonna get rid of the fleas, you're going to get rid of the ticks. You're gonna give it shots. You're gonna get rid of the worms. The dog may not like any of this, but you don't care because your, you own love of the dog. You want to make the dog better. Uh, so there's no reason to think that divine goodness might not want to interfere with us, to change us. This is the way he puts it. God's goodness is fundamentally going to be corrective. So at least here we conceive again, God being all powerful doesn't mean he can do the absurd. He can't deny the existence of free wills or obliterate what they've done.
Speaker 0 00:13:52 Secondly, um, his goodness is not merely niceness. It's not making us simply comfortable as we are. It's turning us into the kinds of creatures he wants us to be as. Uh, Lewis will one time describe it, quoting George McDonald, is that really, God has no other happiness to give than his own happiness. And his own happiness is gonna be radically transformative of our own. So that's the philosophical issues, again, showing that the existence of pain in the world is not philosophically contradictory with the idea of a good God, uh, who is good and all powerful. Then he looks at the history, right? Suffering in a way, is a problem within history. It's not merely a problem. Philosophically, it's not a logical problem. It's an existential problem. So he goes back to the story of the fall, and the question is, if human beings are the sort of beings that have been wounded by an initial fall, then God's goodness is going to have to be very corrective, right?
Speaker 0 00:14:59 It's not just that we have ticks and fleas, but we have, right? And, and worms. We have just our whole organism is slightly off. We don't love God. We don't trust God, right? It's, and again, if you've ever, if you think about rescuing a dog with the same image, right? If it were just about taking off the fleas and the worms and these sorts of things, that would be hard enough. But what do you have to do is you have to rebuild trust. The dog doesn't trust. Well, we don't trust God. And so even when God comes near to us, we don't rely on him. We don't turn to him. That is what needs to be overcome. So he goes back again, developing this theme, uh, from Augustine, but he says, at some point, when the creature becomes aware of God as God and of itself, itself, there's a terrible alternative of choosing God or the self for the center that is open to it again, what will be the center God or self?
Speaker 0 00:15:54 Ultimately, he says that we as the human race, and Adam and Eve chose the self, right? This act of self will, as he puts it, constitutes an utter falsehood. It's false to our creaturely position, and it's the only sin that can be conceived of as the fall. So the thesis of this chapter is simply that man is a species spoiled himself, and that good in our present state must therefore be primarily remedial, corrective good. So if God wants to share his goodness with us, it's going to be transformative. And this is where Lewis continues this idea, the proper good of a creature is to surrender itself to the creator. He mentions, maybe it would've been easy had we never fallen to surrender ourselves entirely, and it would've been pleasant and joyful and ecstatic. But he, uh, he describes it this way, right? That we're not simply imperfect creatures who must be improved.
Speaker 0 00:16:56 We are, as Newman says, rebels who must lay down their arms, right? Our will is, is swollen with the, it's, it's, we, we wanna be adored. We want to be petted. We want to be on a pedestal. We want everything to go our way, right? We wanna be the center of the universe. We want to control things. Um, when things go wrong, we feel, you know, it's, this is our self. And when that self right needs to somehow surrender to God, that's gonna be huge. That's gonna be hard, that's gonna be painful. And this is when Lewis says, right, therefore, God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks to us, in our conscience, but shouts to us in our pains. It is his megaphone to rouse a delph world. Pain breaks through the illusion of our self-sufficiency. Now, Lewis here introduces, I think just this, it, it, it's really just amazing.
Speaker 0 00:17:54 And I think people who struggle with suffering and struggle with God and how to think through this would do well at the beginning of chapter seven. You don't need to read the book, but just, just think of these four things. Lewis says that anytime we wanna think about the world in suffering and good and evil, we have first the simple good comes that comes from God. Secondly, we have the simple evil that comes from rebellious creatures. Third, the exploitation of that evil by God for his redemptive purposes, God can exploit evil for good. Fourth, that God's activity of exploiting evil for good produces a complex good. So we have a simple good, a simple evil God's redemptive purposes turn it into a complex good. There's a rich good that comes out of God overcoming evil. And he says this to which accepted suffering and repented sin contribute.
Speaker 0 00:18:59 So the complex good that God wants to create in the world through conversion, through redemption, is something to which accepted suffering and repented sin. Um, you can also kind of almost imagine this is a little, uh, joke a little bit here is like sometimes I think it's, is it accepted suffering or accepted suffering? A c c e p t I n g accepting suffering? Or am I more the person who doesn't accept suffering? I want to accept suffering. I wanna like, I will accept everything except this E X C E P T, right? I wanna kind of like accept suffering out of my life, right? So this is what Lewis says, right? Again, he's not arguing. The pain is not painful. He just wants to show that the old Christian doctrine of being made perfect through suffering is not incredible. So this is the idea.
Speaker 0 00:19:50 Somehow accepting suffering and repenting sin can produce a rich good, um, that is beautiful in the world, right? There's a beauty and peace that comes about through people that have done this. Now, we might say, of course, I would prefer a different world. Maybe you would, right? I would too <laugh>, right? But this is the world we have. We already have the world of evil. So the fact of the matter is, we're either stuck in a world filled with evil and suffering, or the complex good that God brings about from his redemptive power to which our accepted suffering and repented sin contribute. Two last points on this. At the end of the problem of pain, Lewis then turns to hell and heaven, and hell really is simply the refusal of that self-surrender, right? If we choose not to surrender ourselves to God, then we simply get to stay where we are.
Speaker 0 00:20:46 He, as Lewis will put it, he forgives evil, but he doesn't condone evil. The man who will accept no forgiveness and admit, no guilt cannot be forgiven. And the egoist then ultimately becomes locked and imprisoned within the self. And what Lewis says, in a way, hell offers that self the entire and complete seclusion, which the self desires. And it's interesting, Lewis will say this, that to be a man is heaven. Heaven was made for human beings. Hell was not right. Hell was created by the fall of the angels. And when we moved to hell, we become in a way less fully human. We become trapped by our pride. Uh, he says, in a way, hell means to have been a human right. We become utterly trapped within ourselves, and our passions are utterly controlled by the will. Um, Lewis at this point says this, I believe that the damned are, in one sense, successful rebels to the end, that the doors of hell are locked on the inside.
Speaker 0 00:21:57 The catechism of the Catholic church also describes hell in one way like this. It's the definitive self-exclusion from God. Now, heaven then if hell is just the extreme of the refusal of the self-surrender, heaven is simply that great self-surrender. He will describe heaven in a way as this great dance of the gift of self, the law of the gift, as he will describe. It's also fascinating for if you've ever been, uh, exposed to the teaching of John Paul ii Saint John Paul ii, his theology of the body, his teaching on the importance of really the gift of self as the why do we have bodies so we can give ourselves to one another so we can give ourselves to God. Lewis, it's funny in, in his Lewis and, uh, John Paul ii very different kind of intellectual formations and backgrounds. And yet, because they're both rooted in the Christian tradition, they discover the same realities and help us see them as well.
Speaker 0 00:22:54 Uh, it's also important, any answer we we're gonna think about with the respect to hell or suffering or pain will never be complete apart from the hope of heaven. Right? If this, as Paul will say, if this world is all there is to be lived for, we are the most of pitied. We should be the most pitied of all people, right? We need to recover. The Christian story is a story about getting to heaven. Yes. What we do in this world matters. And yes, this world, um, is important as, as thesal us will say, right? I believe that I shall see the goodness of the Lord and the land of the living. Absolutely. But we are not made for this world. We need to recover a deep sense of hope in heaven. So I wanna suggest then this is where, uh, when we we're, we're gonna take a break in just a minute.
Speaker 0 00:23:40 Uh, but as we close the problem of pain, I want us just to kind of think about the way Lewis helps us to kind of, of attach an image to this self gift. At one point, he'll say, remember, the soul of the human person is, but a hollow, which God fills its union with God is therefore a continual self abandonment, an opening, unveiling a surrender of itself. If our self is created in a way so that we can open ourselves and surrender ourselves to let ourselves be filled with God. We even see this with respect to human relationships, right? The most meaningful, uh, relationships of love, in a way are when we open ourselves up to the intimacy of a relationship with another person. How much more so with God? So this is what Lewis then says, for in self-giving, if anywhere we touch a rhythm, not only of all creation, but of all being for the eternal word himself, gives him himself in sacrifice.
Speaker 0 00:24:39 And not only on calvary, for when he was crucified, he did in that wild weather of his outlying provinces, which he had done at the home and home in glory and gladness, right? In a way, what was the trinity do on earth right? Gives himself, what does the trinity do from all e trinity, right? It's also a communion of gift. From before the foundation of the world, he surrenders the begotten deity back to beginning deity in obedience as the son glorifies the father. So the father glorifies the son. And this is where he says, this is not merely a heavenly law from which we can escape by remaining earthly nor an earthly law from which we can escape by being saved. What is outside the system of self-giving is not earth. It is not nature. It is not ordinary life, but simply and solely hell.
Speaker 0 00:25:26 Right? The God who redeems us is the God who creates us. So the law of the gift of redemption is also the law of gift of creation. So this is how Lewis then describes it. The golden apple of selfhood thrown among the false gods became an apple of discord because they scrambled for it. They did not know the first rule of the holy game, which is that every player must by all means, touch the ball and then immediately pass it on. To be found with it in your hand is a fault to clinging to it death. But when it flies to and fro among the players too swift for I to follow. And the great master himself leads the revelry, giving himself eternally back to his creatures in the generation and back to himself in the sacrifice of the word. Then indeed, the eternal dance makes heaven drowsy with the harmony.
Speaker 0 00:26:14 All pains and pleasures we have known on earth are early initiations into the movements of that dance. But the dance itself is strictly incomparable with the sufferings of this present life as we draw near to its uncreated, rhythm, pain, and pleasure, sink almost out of sight. There is joy in the dance, but it does not exist for the sake of joy. It does not even exist for the sake of good or of love. It is love himself and good himself and therefore happy. It does not exist for us, but we exist for it. The size and emptiness of the universe, which frightened us at the outset of this book, should awe us still for though we may be no more, they may be no more than a subjective byproduct of our three dimensional imagining they symbolize a great truth.
Speaker 0 00:27:05 Oz earth is to all the stars so doubtless that we, our men and all our concerns are to all creation as the stars are to space itself. So are all creatures, all thrones and powers and mightiest of all the created goods to the abyss of the self existing being who is to us father son, an indwelling comforter, but of whom no man or no angel can conceive what is in himself and for himself. And what is the work that he makes from the beginning to the end. Uh, so this idea that it's pain that helps us to recover and enter into this great surrender, this surrender of the gift of self, and to enter into the great dance. So we'll return after a break.
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Speaker 0 00:28:24 Welcome back to the Catholic Theology Show as we continue our series on in Narnia with CSS Lewis. And today our looking at the question of suffering, and is it reasonable to believe in Christianity amid a world filled with suffering? We're looking particularly at some of the ideas that Lewis develops in his problem of pain, and in his Chronicles of Narnia, the magician's nephew. Now, just stepping back a little bit in the magician's nephew, uh, he begins to contrast two different ways of looking at the world. One way of looking at the world as knowledge for the sake of power. This goes back to Francis Bacon knowledge as power. Uh, and we're gonna see this in the characters in the magician's nephew of Queen, uh, Jadis and Uncle Andrew, right? The magician's nephew. So Uncle Andrew is the magician. What's the magician trying to do? Well exert power over the world through knowledge Lewis.
Speaker 0 00:29:29 In his abolition, a man will say that magic and applied science grew up together, especially in the 16th and 17th centuries. And they were both attempts to try to control the world. Um, and he just said, of course, you know, they were like twins, but one was sick and died magic because it really wasn't that effective. But applied science became much more effective. But their goals, in a way, are the same. Lewis is not talking here about science for the sake of discovery, and he's not speaking against technological manipulation of the world. But he is saying that if knowledge is only for the sake of manipulating the world, right then we are losing a higher knowledge, really, of why ought we to manipulate the world and how ought we to do so, right? What are the limits? Um, knowledge for Lewis has to exist within a moral dimension of what does it mean properly to love ourselves, to love God, and to love our neighbor.
Speaker 0 00:30:32 So again, one way of contrasting knowledge is knowledge is for the sake of power and control. The other one is that knowledge is for the sake of wisdom. Uh, sometimes people will say that modern philosophy begins in doubt and ancient philosophy began in wonder. I think perhaps a better way of putting as the modern philosophy begins with a desire to control, uh, descartes and his discourse on method will say that if we follow his method of doing science, we will become masters and possessors of nature. Right? Lewis saw this as, wait a second. That sounds pretty familiar. To become masters and possesses of nature is right to resinate, to reclaim the fall, right? To be able to know for ourselves what is good or evil that we become, right? Really the creator, right? We step into the role of God and take over his providence, right?
Speaker 0 00:31:35 Lewis thinks in some ways a way of putting it is that, you know, there's certain aspects of modern thinking that reject God and say, God, you haven't done a good enough job running the universe. Your providence has been found wanting. So we'll take over. And then human beings try to exercise ultimate power and control. And I think one of the things we need to remember is that this is not done primarily out of a desire. I don't know how to put it. It's not a desire to try to be great. It's more of a desire to try to control and prevent suffering. Um, bacon, Francis Bacon would describe himself that he wants philosophy and science no longer to be about the discovery of truth, but to be, um, to alleviate the state of human beings, human beings and human life is filled with suffering. All of our thinking ought to be mo directed to alleviate that suffering.
Speaker 0 00:32:33 There's something very kind of compassionate on the surface about that desire. Bacon himself, uh, thought it was part of our biblical mandate, but Lewis wants to say that it, it's, it's ultimately an error. It's, it's a mistake. Uh, it's a limited way of looking at the world. Uh, so that's kind of what Lewis wants to recover is, uh, we have the notion of knowledge as power control, or knowledge as wonder, which in a way also means reception. We're gonna see Lewis is really gonna then consider what do we mean when we talk about nature? When we see the world, when we see nature, when we see creation, do we see it as really raw material upon which to impose our will for the sake of our pleasures and to avoid pain? Or when we see the world and we see nature, we see creation, do we really see it as created by God as having a life, right?
Speaker 0 00:33:33 Nature itself comes from the Latin word, not tos, right? Which means to be born. What's the best example of something as a part of nature? Well, it's living things that receive life and pass them on. And we ought to have a kind of wonder and respect for that life. We can't make it right. We can simply receive it. And of course, if we see it also with a sense of God's creation, uh, then again, we see there's a fundamental order, a harmony, uh, that we need to discover. And then of course, within that we can manipulate the world. We can use technology, we can do certain things, but we have to ask ourselves, can we eliminate suffering? Can we eliminate death? Can we eliminate sin? Uh, one of my, uh, professors and mentors, uh, father Matthew Lamb was often really, he would love to just point out that despite all of our attempts or the attempts of modernity to overcome sin and death, hospitals and prisons remain very well populated, right?
Speaker 0 00:34:34 We ultimately have to recognize that sin and death are really things we have to learn to embrace, to respond to. They cannot be overcome, right? We may extend life, but can we extend it indefinitely? Okay? So that's kind of the starting point. Uh, the second thing that Lewis does is he wants to say that when we, that what we see and what we discover about the world depends upon what kind of person we are. So in the story of the Magician's nephew, um, he has ery and poly two children, uh, from kind of, uh, around the turn of the century, England, this is the turn of around 1900 or so. And in that time period, uh, they actually find a way through Uncle Andrew who creates some rings, uh, to go into another world. They go into the wood between the worlds where everything is alive, and then they go to other worlds.
Speaker 0 00:35:32 They go to the world of char, which is a dead world. It's a great city. Uh, it's kind of like the city of Babylon and the city of Nineveh. Uh, you can almost think about the city of Babel. And in that city, they of, um, ery gets curious and he rings a bell and wakes up the evil witch jadis. We discovered Jadis had destroyed every living thing on charm, uh, by uttering a deplorable word, right? Um, and you can, Lewis, this is one of the times where he's almost kind of echoing our power of, right, the power that became unleashed in terms of nuclear weapons where we could actually destroy the world. But of course, this is an ancient, uh, the deception and power of evil is, is an ancient affliction. So anyway, they go back, uh, the witch, uh, Jadis, the queen, uh, comes with them.
Speaker 0 00:36:25 They go into, actually eventually they go into the world of London. Digi and Polly want to get her out of London. Uh, they get her and the rest of them, and they end up going to this brand new world that doesn't even exist. It turns out to be the world of Narnia that's going to be created. We witness then the creation of Narnia, and not only the creation of Narnia, but we also then have the introduction of evil through the witch. And then we begin to see how different people see the creation. Uh, the two great kind of opposites are gonna be Uncle Andrew, who really sees the world of Narnia as just an opportunity to make money. Where the cabby, who's this kind of faithful, uh, cabby, English cabby who ends up, uh, actually becoming the first king, uh, and his wife becomes the first queen of Narnia, he sees the creation as something to be wondered at, right?
Speaker 0 00:37:25 The first thing that cabby will say actually is glory be said, the cabby. I'd have been a better man all my life if I'd known there were things like this. When Uncle Andrew is chattering away, at some point the cabby finally tells him to be quiet. Oh, stoic governor, do stoic. Watch in and listen in the thing. At present, not talking. We should use our reason to understand, to talk, to think about the world, but first we have to watch and listen. Otherwise we will miss kind of the point. So this is what I want to describe. Then what happens. We must go back a little bit and explain what the whole scene looked like from Uncle Andrew's point of view. Remember, this is Lyn's actually created Narnia. He's created all the animals. And then Lewis says this, for what you see and hear depends a good deal on where you are standing.
Speaker 0 00:38:23 It also depends on what sort of person you are. What we discover is that Uncle Andrew can't hear the animals of Narnia talk. He only hears them snarl. Uh, so he thinks they're just threatening him, attacking him. He can't hear the fact that they're actually rational creatures using words to speak to Lyn, to speak to him, to speak about truth. So at some point he says he missed the whole point when the sun rose and he saw that the singer was a lion. In the story, Aslan sings Narnia into creation, right? And we have this course that God created all things through his word. This doesn't have to be a spoken word, it can also be a sung word. He tried his hardest to make believe that it wasn't singing and never had been singing, but only roaring as any lion might do in a zoo in our own world.
Speaker 0 00:39:17 Now, the trouble about trying to make yourself stupider than you really are is that you very often succeed. Uncle Andrew did. He soon did hear nothing but roaring in Aslan's song soon he couldn't have heard anything else, even if he had wanted to. So what's Lewis getting at here? Well, in a way, what he's suggesting is, is that in our own world, if we want to think about human beings as merely animals as not having logos or speech that can speak about the truth of morality, the truth of the moral law, we can do that. We can think about human beings as merely animals that grunt and snarl and roar, where all of the world is merely a balance of power, right? Or we can see human beings as they truly are made in the image and likeness of God, subject to a moral law, having the capacity for love.
Speaker 0 00:40:22 But this depends upon what kind of you and as Louis puts it, the problem with trying to make yourself stupider than you are is that very often we succeed, uncle Andrew did. And I think many people today recognize that there's something intrinsically of worth with human beings. Uh, you can see there's a passionate desire for justice. There's a passionate desire for all these things, but they have a hard time genuinely understanding how these things can be. And we become very distrustful and therefore we lower human beings away from the moral law and thinking that they can become happy merely with animal instincts. So one of the things that's gonna be interesting with this is what does Uncle Andrew want? What does the witch at later times promise, dig, degree? Well, in part, it's gonna be called the land of youth, the promise of endless youth.
Speaker 0 00:41:18 What does, what do we want? When we give up on the idea of a moral law? We begin to want just longevity. We want to be healthy and live for a very long time. Our desires are no longer proportioned to the true depth of the human soul created for God by God. Therefore, our true desire can only be fulfilled by being in union and communion with him in heaven. Instead, we find kind of an earthly heaven in the Lewis's Screwtape letters at one time. He will say that. So our desire for heaven is so inbuilt in us. It's so inveterate in us that when we cease believing in heaven, in heaven, we will begin trying to find heaven on earth. We still long for heaven, but now our longing for heaven is just longing for a long life, wanting to live not only for a hundred years, but maybe 200 years.
Speaker 0 00:42:18 Maybe we could have our bodies frozen and then eventually when we could thaw them when we've cured our disease, right? We, this is, this is kind of our big dream, our big desire. And Lewis wants to contrast that with the desire for heaven. So, so again, stepping back then, we can think about knowledge as this desire for control. When Uncle Andrew looks at Narnia, he begins to even talk about, oh, he could build battleships here. Right? He sees Narnia and thinks about munitions factory, right? Power, control, money, extended life. Okay? On the other side, what Lewis wants us to do is actually the modern world and the modern attempt at technological control of society and of the world doesn't actually reveal its full beauty. We don't recognize the true beauty of creation. And in this story of magician's nephew, we get the account in a way of retelling of genesis, both the beauty of creation and the fall.
Speaker 0 00:43:20 Uh, Lewis writes this book, uh, after having written, he writes it. This is written in the later fifties, but earlier on he had written a preface to Paradise Lost. And in many ways, magician's nephew is kind of a retelling, not only of Genesis, but also of Milton's paradise lost. And it's trying to help us to reimagine a world in which creation. How could we recover? We may believe intellectually that creation is good, but we often feel as though the world simply is bad, right? Uh, Lewis will say at one point, uh, in a quote that I've mentioned, but I wanna return to is this idea that reason for him is the organ of truth, but imagination, the organ of meaning, right? That truths become meaningful when we can attach them to images. So we have to have an image of creation as genuinely kind of good and wonderful.
Speaker 0 00:44:19 And this is how Lewis describes lyn's singing creation into being in the darkness. Something was happening at last. A voice had begun to sing. It was very far away, and dickory found it hard to decide from what direction it was coming. Sometimes it seemed to come from all directions at once. Sometimes he thought it was coming out of the earth beneath them. Its lower notes were deep enough to be the voice of the earth herself. There were no words, there was hardly even a tune. But it was beyond comparison. The most beautiful noise he had ever heard. It was so beautiful, he could hardly bear it. The horse seemed to like it too. He gave the sort of Winnie a horse would if after years of being a cab horse, it found itself back in an old field where it had played it as a fo and saw someone it remembered and loved coming across the field to bring a lump of sugar.
Speaker 0 00:45:09 God said the cabby ant it. Lovely. Then two wonders happened at the same time. One was that the voices suddenly were joined. The voice was suddenly joined by other voices, more voices than you could possibly count. They were in harmony with it. But as far higher up the scale, cold, tingling, silvery voices. The second wonder was that the blackness overhead all at once was blazing with stars. The new stars and the new voices began at exactly the same time. And that's when the cabby says, glory be, I'd have been a better man all my life if I known there were things like this. The cabby says, right, what is knowledge for? It's to know the glory of the universe. The glory of creation. The glory of God manifested in creation. Creation was meant to be an icon of God's glory. We've turned it into an idol.
Speaker 0 00:46:07 Psalm 19 says, right, the heavens are telling the glory of God. The firmament declares his handiwork, right? That's what creation is meant to do. We have to recover a notion of creation. True knowledge is to recognize the goodness of creation. So if that's the case, then what Lewis is gonna suggest in the magician's nephew is that there we need to desire more than a long life. We need to desire a good life. There's a beautiful, uh, line when at the end of the story, uh, the witch has actually eaten an apple from the tree and the tree will give her endless life. Or basically she will become largely immortal. And Dickery says, well, well, um, like he doesn't want that to happen to her. He says, no, it will work. The magic always works. But Lyn says this, she has won her heart's desire. She has un wearying strength and endless days like a goddess.
Speaker 0 00:47:03 But length of days with an evil heart is only length of misery. And already she begins to know it. And Louis has this great line that I always love all get what they want. They do not always like it. Do. What do we want? Do we want endless days? Do we want to have a long life or do we wanna have a good life? Uh, Lewis I think takes it for granted that we should want to have a good life. Um, at one point, when the witch is trying to tempt Dickery to take the apple for himself, she says this to him, eat it, boy. Eat it. And you and I will both live forever and be king and queen of this whole world or of you world. If we decide to go back there, of course we know she's lying 'cause she would never make him king alongside of her.
Speaker 0 00:47:46 But Dickery says, no thanks. I don't know that I care very much about living on and on after everyone I know is dead. I'd rather live an ordinary life and die and go to heaven. It's just a simple idea. It's better to be good than to live a long time. Better to live a good life. And the good life we really wanna live cannot be lived in this world. It needs to be lived in heaven. But then the witch plays her real card, not simply offering ery endless days. But what about his mother? His mother who is dying of cancer? Um, what about this mother of yours? You could relieve her pain. You could cure her cancer.
Speaker 0 00:48:34 Oh, gasp, ery as if he'd been hurt. And he put his hand to his head for he knew now that the most terrible choice lay before him. Eventually he sees that he says he had promised to give to the apple, back to Aslan. And he even says, mother herself wouldn't like it. Awfully strict about keeping promises and not stealing and all those sorts of things. She'd tell me not to do it quick as anything, right? Eventually Dickery does take the apple, not for himself, not for his mother, but gives it back to Lyn. And there's this beautiful scene when we'd already looked at the time when he is so fearful and in pain and crying about his mother, that he looked up at Lyn and he sees Lyn's tears. The first thing is to see lyn's tears. But then we see what's even more powerful is we have to remember Lyn's tears on the way back from the garden as they're taking the apple back to Lyn, not for himself, not to his mother.
Speaker 0 00:49:39 Diggory never spoke on the way back, and the others were shy of speaking to him. He was very sad and he wasn't even sure all the time that he had done the right thing. But whenever he remembered the shining tears in lyn's eyes, he became sure it's not facing up the suffering. Accepting suffering is not something that we merely can handle logically right? To be willing to suffer for the sake of the good. Right? He has to remember the shining tears in lyn's eyes. He became sure when we remember the love of Jesus Christ shown for us on the cross, right? Uh, the catechism will say that Jesus on the cross knew each of us and loved us. Jesus isn't looking at the world on the cross. He's looking and loving me. When I remember the shining tears in lyn's eyes, I can become sure.
Speaker 0 00:50:33 So as in closing, I wanna just highlight a couple themes. Uh, first this theme about right. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks to us, in our conscience, but shouts to us in our pains. It's his megaphone to Ros a deaf world. When pain and suffering happen, it is an opportunity for us to give up our illusion of self-sufficiency, to give up the illusion that we can handle life on our own, that we can manage our own lives in some sense. As I remember hearing somebody say, right, when we bear the unbearable, when we suffer the insufferable, it's only then that we begin to see as God sees and love as God loves. It's really the death of the ego also then to think about this notion of it's accepted suffering and repented sin suffering is of no use unless we accept it. And except if you look up the word in the dictionary, it actually means to receive as a gift.
Speaker 0 00:51:37 What on earth does that mean? I have no idea, but I do know that as created by God, everything that is somehow comes from his hand as my creator and my father. And God has promised that all things will work to the good for those who love God. And there's a beautiful line that, um, so Maurice Baring was a fellow. He was a friend of GK Chesterton in that time period, he wrote a, a book called Darby and Joan. And it said this one had to accept suffering for it to be of any healing power. That is the most difficult thing in the world. A priest once said to him, when you understand that accepted sorrow means you will understand everything, it is the secret of life. Radical acceptance, willing acceptance. This is what Jesus Christ does on the cross. He willingly embraces the cross.
Speaker 0 00:52:31 We have to, we are invited to do so as well. And finally, let's always remember Lyn's tears. Jesus' tears. We never suffer alone. Let us remember that God becomes incarnate, right? God in his eternity can't suffer, but he becomes human so that he can suffer with us. And so therefore, we never suffer alone. And really this is our choice. Will we respond to our suffering in anger and rebellion like the thief on the cross that cursed Jesus? Or will we repent our sins, admit our powerlessness? Will we accept our suffering? Turn like the good thief on the cross and say, Jesus, remember me. When you come into your kingdom right? And hear the good words today, you will be with me in paradise. Thank you.
Speaker 2 00:53:29 Thank you so much for joining us for this podcast. If you like this episode, please rate and review it on your favorite podcast app to help others find the show. And if you want to take the next step, please consider joining our Annunciation Circle so we can continue to bring you more free content. We'll see you next time on the Catholic Theology Show.
