Imaginary Man

...Discussing Lewis's childhood, for instance, Jacobs relates how Lewis and his brother Warren spent much of their childhood conjuring entire worlds and imagining adventures to happen inside them...

...Admirers and detractors alike even think of the obvious Christian inspiration of The Chronicles of Narnia as something distinct from the story itself—as if Lewis wrote a fairy tale and injected it (for better or worse) with Christian themes...

...Lewis presented both Christianity and imagination as things far richer than we are accustomed to thinking of them...

...He held that philosophical position in spite of his attachment to the enchantment of myths...

...Speaking of the medieval view of the cosmos in contrast to ours, Lewis called it "a festival not a machine, overwhelming in its greatness but satisfying in its harmony...

...So C.S...

...As an intellectual biography, it Daniel Sullivan is a writer in New Jersey...

...Here, then, is the valuable insight of Lewis's that The Narnian illuminates for us: that the highest truth is something imagined, not proved, and that it comes not in arguments but in stories...

...Unlike the systematic ideologies and philosophies that competed for the attention of intellectuals in Lewis's time, Christianity came from a powerful story...

...Jacobs's accomplishment is to reveal this deep and ennobling aspect of Lewis's thought by showing the intrinsic connection between his religious and his imaginary writing...

...nearly all that I believed to be real I thought grim and meaningless...

...In a letter he wrote shortly after his conversion, Lewis said, "the doctrines we get out of the true myth are of course less true: they are translations into our concepts and ideas of that wh...

...For those who view fairy tales as stories "just for kids" would also put aside, as childish things, mythmaking, storytelling, and all the flights of fancy that bear man to delight...

...He called it "joy...

...For him, Christianity was not merely a set of doctrines to which we assent, or a self-help guide to a more satisfying life, but a powerful story that invites us to live lives richer than a mere existence as atomized individuals...

...In The Narnian Alan Jacobs charts the development of that imagination, showing how Lewis's love of fairy tales and his deep Christian faith were part of the same devotion...

...In the process, Jacobs presents a valuable insight at the heart of Lewis' thought...

...Jacobs calls it "delight...

...Lewis was a hard-bitten atheist...

...They filled him with a sense of longing and possibility, a delightful feeling that anything can happen in what is a beautiful world...

...Thus, they shut themselves into the "grim, meaningless" world that the young, materialist C.S...

...It opens before us the possibility of great love, sacrifice, humility, and strength...

...Any other meaning that men might attribute to things was illusory...

...His brand of unbelief seems to have been a typical late Victorian anthropological materi-alism—that religion is made by man, and men are made of matter...

...Ultimately, he came to believe that the Christian myth was, in fact, the truest and most beautiful story that there is...

...As Jacobs tells it, the rich products of man's imagination provided Lewis an entry into some of the most sublime joys of life...

...But many readers separate the two parts of his work...

...This delight would animate all of Lewis's writing as a Christian, including, near the end of his life, The Chronicles of Narnia...

...This approach is most effective when Jacobs discusses the central event in Lewis's intellectual life: his conversion to Anglican Christianity...

...Lewis had mistakenly believed was all there is...

...Something like that captures the view of man's life that Lewis believed anyone could take who dared to imagine it...

...And his clear presentation of this insight makes The Narnian worthwhile reading, despite its several slow chapters and occasionally plodding prose...

...But for the mature, Christian Lewis, the world was not a mechanical thing, set in its course and monotonous, but rather always expanding and pregnant with possibility...

...According to Jacobs, Lewis got past his philosophical pessimism primarily by learning that myth, with all its delightful enchantment and possibility, contains truth about the world that neither science nor philosophy can access...

...But C.S...

...It is no surprise, also, that Lewis, who detested every minute he spent at boarding school, envisioned eternal life in Narnia as a "permanent holiday from school...

...By keeping the Narnia books always before the reader, Jacobs reminds us of Lewis's lifelong devotion to the delight he found in such stories...

...That is," Jacobs adds, "the language of actual historical event, such as can be narrated in mythical form, is a more truthful language than the language of 'concepts and ideas.'" By focusing on Lewis's devotion to story, Jacobs highlights this thought, which might otherwise seem strange coming from a polemicist...

...Refusing to believe in the myths he loved, Lewis trusted only in matter— the physical reality that his senses verified...

...For Lewis, Christianity is the true story that communicates the truth of God to men, and to believe in and follow Christ is to join one's own life to that narrative...

...As he describes a life that began in Protestant Belfast, and ended in the lecture rooms of Oxford and Cambridge, Jacobs consistently relates the events and thoughts of Lewis's life at various times to the fairy tale series he would write so many years later...

...In short, they close themselves off to the imagination for fear of being duped into believing in "kids' stuff...

...As he himself put it, "nearly all that I loved I believed to be imaginary...

...Lewis himself always insisted that he simply described the world Narnia as his imagination conjured it...

...sic] God has already expressed in a language more adequate, namely the actual incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection...

...starts with the question: "What sort of man wrote The Chronicles of Narnia ?" Jacobs's basic answer guides the whole book: As a friend described him, C.S...

...To be sure, he first decided that the philosophical basis for his unbelief was far weaker than he had thought, but what attracted him to Christianity positively was his deeper understanding of the truth found in the stories he loved...

...From his bookish youth, the charms of myth—from Homer to Norse mythology to Renaissance epic—gave Lewis an almost complete satisfaction...

...Lewis was "a man in love with the imagination...

...And just as the delight of all myths gives readers a wider sense of what human life can be, so the power of the Christian story, as something that actually happened, really does open up eternal possibility to men...

...Parallel to this "story-book Christianity," Lewis indicates how imagination and story themselves are more important than modern society usually appreciates...

...As a young man, C.S...

...It is a story of God among men that demands of man feats of the imagination—for instance, to imagine God incarnated as a man, crucified by men and thus winning their salvation, and rising again...