More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Joe Rigney
Read between
February 11 - August 19, 2025
Living in Narnia has profoundly shaped my view of society, culture, marriage, parenting, education, and theology.
I have met God—the true God, the living God, the Father of Jesus Christ—in and through the bubbling that Lewis called Narnia, and I have grown in my love and affection for Jesus through breathing that Narnian air. What’s more, I believe this is exactly what Lewis (and God) intended.
Lewis defined allegory as “a composition (whether pictorial or literary) in which immaterial realities are represented by feigned physical objects, e.g. a pictured Cupid allegorically represents erotic love (which in reality is an experience, not an object occupying a given area of space) or, in Bunyan, a giant represents Despair.”6 The two key components of this definition are: allegories are imagined (“feigned”) physical objects, and they represent non-physical (“immaterial”) realities.
In contrast, a “supposal” forces us out of our world into another one, what Lewis’s friend J.R.R. Tolkien described as a “secondary world.” By creating Narnia, Lewis invites us out of our own skin and into that of Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy (and later Caspian, Eustace, Jill, Shasta, and the rest).
But our time in Narnia is not an end in itself. We go there so that we then can live better here.
Stories about realistic, but highly improbable scenarios send children back to their lives “undivinely discontented.”
“Since it is so likely that they will meet cruel enemies, let them at least have heard of brave knights and heroic courage… Let there be wicked kings and beheadings, battles and dungeons, giants and dragons, and let villains be soundly killed at the end of the book.”
am almost inclined to set it up as a canon that a children’s story which is only enjoyed by children is a bad children’s story.”13 Or again, “it is certainly my opinion that a book worth reading only in childhood is not worth reading even then.”
To summarize, Lewis sees the progression like this: 1) the marginalization of value statements leads to 2) the separation of fact from value, which leads to 3) the creation of men without chests, which leads to 4) the elevation of “instinct” as an ultimate value, which, because of its own self-contradictions, leads to 5) man’s attempt to conquer nature through science and technology and 6) the tyranny of the conditioners over mankind, which in the end is 7) the abolition of man. Such is the trajectory of modern education, and it is a trajectory that Lewis is committed to reversing.
It is the doctrine of objective value, the belief that certain attitudes are really true, and others really false, to the kind of thing the universe is and the kind of things we are. Those who know the Tao can hold that to call children delightful or old men venerable is not simply to record a psychological fact about our own parental or filial emotions at the moment, but to recognize a quality which demands a certain response from us whether we make it or not.
when we are confronted with various aspects of reality, we are obligated to respond with certain rational and emotional reactions. What’s more, the doctrine of objective value is absolutely essential for human flourishing, both as individuals and in societies.
But it’s not enough to simply feel something in response to the objective reality of the world. You must also feel rightly and proportionately to the way the world is.
St. Augustine defines virtue as ordo amoris, the ordinate condition of the affections in which every object is accorded that kind and degree of love which is appropriate to it. Aristotle says that the aim of education is to make the pupil like and dislike what he ought.
Indeed, as Aslan says to Lucy on one occasion, “This was the very reason you were brought into Narnia, that by knowing me here for a little, you might know me better there.”
First, the Bible teaches that magic is real.
Second, the Bible forbids sorcery, fortune-telling, divination, and the interpretation of omens (Ex. 22:18; Deut. 18:10).
Third, despite these prohibitions, faithful believers are numbered among the magicians in Gentile courts.
if we adopt the standard dictionary definition of magic as “the power of apparently influencing the course of events by using mysterious or supernatural forces,” then we might think of miracles and signs and wonders as a kind of “magic.” The magical combat between Moses and the magicians of Egypt would indicate as much.
So then, according to the Bible, the power of influencing the world using supernatural forces (i.e., magic) is very real. When used to lead people into idolatry and sin or to oppress and enslave others, it is forbidden. On the other hand, when we acknowledge we ultimately do not control God and his power, and we seek power from the hand of God for the good of people, God’s miraculous signs and wonders through us might be described as a kind of good magic.
For Lewis, the Deep Magic is the Moral Law—what in The Abolition of Man he calls the Tao—the fundamental moral framework upon which the universe is based. It is a reflection of God’s own harmonious order, the walls around the City that make life inside possible.
As G. K. Chesterton reminded us, the reason that order and structure exist in the world is so that good things can run wild.
Conflicts of power and enchantments are real, and they matter. But beneath the power encounters and magical warfare is Deep Magic and Deeper, the inflexible solidity of the Moral Law and the breathtaking beauty of Sacrificial Love. Lewis reminds us that substitution is a kind of magic, a mysterious and supernatural force that transforms the world, overcoming every form of treachery.
Indeed, the Witch provides two meals to Edmund: the enchanted candy and stale bread and water. The Witch and her evil are the origins of both gluttony and asceticism, of sinful indulgence and sinful austerity.
But more than just awakening my hunger, breathing Narnian air awakens a desire for a particular type of meal, one with tasty food, good conversation, lots of joy and laughter and revelry and strategizing about how to defeat the White Witch.
Because Jesus, like Aslan, is Lord of the Feast.
who you are determines what you hear, how you think, how you respond to temptation and failure, how you react to unpleasant situations, and how you respond to beauty and glory.
We are always becoming who we will be. We are, all of us, en-storied creatures, living our lives in a narrative, which means our lives have directions, trends, and trajectories. And these trajectories are guided by an Author who teaches us that we will reap what we sow.
So we ought to ask ourselves some probing questions: Where am I compromising? Am I nursing small grievances, the kind that grow and fester into hatred of those closest to me? Do I treat those around me with respect and kindness, or do I love to show off my own perceived superiority? When I wrong someone, do I repent thoroughly, seek forgiveness sincerely, make restitution quickly, and then move on properly? Given the present trajectory of my life, what would happen if I should find myself stumbling through the wardrobe into Narnia? Will Providence guide me to meet a faun who becomes a friend,
...more
This is the central lesson of Trumpkin: embracing obedience to lawful authority, even when you disagree with the orders.
Trumpkin shows us that coming to faith is not always like getting knocked off your horse by a blinding light. Sometimes it’s a slow process filled with unexpected twists and turns.
Chivalry, with its dual demand on men, sought to break this cycle by creating lion-like lambs and lamb-like lions.
For manners, whether in the court or at the dinner table, are simply love in the little things, love in the trifles.
For Lewis was at war with “nothing-buttery” not only because it is false, but because it is ugly, degrading, and harmful to human flourishing.
Biblical metaphors aren’t merely creative ways to communicate; they are deeply and fundamentally true, divinely designed analogies that enable us to more fully understand God and his world. So at the very least, let us not denigrate and dismiss metaphors as beneath us in our scientific and “enlightened” age.
By all means, let us explore the physical and material world, wisely and faithfully using the tools of science to discover how the world works. But let us never fall prey to the seductive reductionism that explains away the wonders of God’s world. Let us resist with every fiber of our being the banality of restricting reality to those things that we can weigh and measure with our fancy instruments.
The only words that ever satisfied me as describing Nature are the terms used in the fairy books, “charm,” “spell,” “enchantment.” They express the arbitrariness of the fact and its mystery. A tree grows fruit because it is a magic tree. Water runs downhill because it is bewitched.
1. At least once every day I shall look steadily up at the sky and remember that I, a consciousness with a conscience, am on a planet traveling in space with wonderfully mysterious things above and about me.
6. I shall open my eyes and ears. Once every day I shall simply stare at a tree, a flower, a cloud, or a person. I shall not then be concerned at all to ask what they are but simply be glad that they are. I shall joyfully allow them the mystery of what Lewis calls their “divine, magical, terrifying and ecstatic” existence.
The terrors of the night are not to be dismissed so lightly. However, the joy of waking, the joy of morning, is almost enough to make the nightmare worth it.
The Myth of Progress dismisses “traditional morality,” “practical reason,” and “natural law” (what Lewis sometimes refers to as the Tao) because it is old and outdated.
Mercy, detached from Justice, grows unmerciful.
Lewis argues that the Humanitarian theory is what enables otherwise good men to do unspeakably evil things.
Lewis regarded it as “essential to oppose the Humanitarian theory of punishment, root and branch, wherever we encounter it.” He thought that such theories were bound together with notions of government in which the State “exists not to protect our rights but to do us good or make us good.” The State’s role in providing such “goods and services” requires an increasingly large bureaucratic government, one that inevitably enslaves its citizens.
For living like a Narnian is no individualistic affair; our families, our schools, our churches and communities must also come to reflect the nobility, liberty, order, and beauty of Aslan and his people.
categories for evaluating the claims of Christ. This is a kind of indirect apologetics, a softening of the soil before the planting of the seeds.
Do you think I am trying to weave a spell? Perhaps I am; but remember your fairy tales. Spells are used for breaking enchantments as well as for inducing them. And you and I have need of the strongest spell that can be found to wake us from the evil enchantment of worldliness which has been laid upon us for nearly a hundred years.
In a world of darkness, desire for the sun is an oddity, a strange anomaly crying out for an explanation.
Lewis really believed that pain, suffering, and hardship had a vital role in clearing the mind and enabling a person to see what really matters, and more importantly to hear from the One who speaks through the pain.
“If Christianity is untrue, then no honest man will want to believe it, however helpful it might be: if it is true, every honest man will want to believe it, even if it gives him no help at all.”
he is providing a terrific example of how to remember in the dark what we have known in the light. Narnia is real, and Puddleglum had lived there his whole life. He really had seen a sky full of stars, and the sun coming up out of the sea in the morning, shining brightly in the midday sky, and then sinking behind the mountains at night. His faithful and obedient confession is no blind leap, but a deep commitment to his own experience of the truth of Overland, Narnia, and Aslan.
