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The Heav'ns and All the Powers Therein: The Medieval Cosmos and the World of Narnia
To the medieval mind, the universe was, in Lewis's phrase, "tingling with anthropomorphic life, dancing, ceremonial, a festival not a machine." For modern men and women struggling in a disenchanted culture to sustain a sense of creation as a meaningful gift, the medieval cosmology is a refreshing picture of a reality deeper than that studied by physicists or astronomers.
CON-25-C CD $7.00 [Add to cart] ** Note: MP3 downloads may be burned to a conventional CD, and come with burning instructions as well as templates for printing labels and jewel case tray labels. This is one of a series of Conversations produced by MARS HILL AUDIO. Two other titles examine C. S. Lewis's thought and writing: Till We Have Faces and the Meaning of Myth, a conversation with Thomas Howard, and Alan Jacobs on The Narnian. We have also produced an Anthology entitled The Christian Mind of C. S. Lewis, which features interviews with Clyde Kilby, Gilbert Meilaender, Michael Aeschliman, and others. To see a list of other available recordings, see our online catalog. If you like, you may download an free demonstration issue (ZIP, 33.5MB, containing MP3 files) of the MARS HILL AUDIO Journal, our bimonthly audio magazine. |
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In his remarkable book Planet Narnia, Michael Ward makes a compelling case that each of the seven books in the Narnia Chronicles bears a striking likeness to the character and qualities associated with one of the seven planets celebrated in medieval cosmology. Ward reminds us that "Lewis's whole imaginative outlook was enamored of the medieval, or Ptolemaic, or Aristotelian view of the heavens." Lewis described that view in some detail in his book, The Discarded Image, his introduction to the Medieval worldview. The only defect in this now discarded cosmology was that it was not true (in the sense of being factual). But it was beautiful, a great resource for the imagination, and for that reason, Lewis believed, worth retaining. In an essay that accompanied a 1935 poem called "The Planets," Lewis explained that "the characters of the planets, as conceived by medieval astrology, seem to me to have a permanent value as spiritual symbols." Lewis's conviction about that value is quite explicit in That Hideous Strength, the last book in his space trilogy, in the scene depicting the descent of the planetary gods to the house at St. Anne's, a descent that in Lewis's account has echoes of Pentecost.
The subtitle to Planet Narnia is The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C. S. Lewis. In the book, Ward looks not just at the Narnia Chronicles, but at the other fiction and at many essays and books to fill out how Lewis understood this unfactual set of ideas could still be of use. In this Conversation with Ken Myers, Ward explains Lewis's sympathy for the medieval cosmology, describes the importance of symbolism and metaphor in Lewis's ideas of how language and literature communicate deeper truths, and explains how he stumbled across the "key" to unlock Narnia by reading a line in a poem by Lewis about Jupiter and the Jovian sensibility: "Winter passed and guilt forgiven." 67 minutes.