The Narnia Code: Hidden inklings of the God-breathed cosmos

Many readers have sensed that there is more
than meets the eye in Lewis's Narnia tales,
but Michael Ward is the man
who finally discovered what it was.

A couple of years ago, I wrote a couple of posts on Michael Ward's theory of the unifying principle  that guided C. S. Lewis in writing the Narnia tales, and Ward's book, Planet Narnia, in which he provides a detailed analysis of the Narnia novels. The book was based on his doctoral dissertation and was, I suppose, fairly scholarly in tone. Apparently Ward and/or his publisher felt that Planet Narnia would be heavy reading for a lot of Narnia fans, so now there is a new book which (as far as I can tell from the preview available on Amazon) is essentially Planet Narnia reworked for the popular market.

The new book is The Narnia Code: C. S. Lewis and the Secret of the Seven Heavens. Here's a portion of the publisher's blurb:

In The Narnia Code, Michael Ward presents an astonishing literary discovery. Drawing on the whole range of Lewis’s writings, Ward reveals the single subject that provides the link between all seven novels. He explains how Lewis structured the series, why he kept the code secret, and what it shows about his understanding of the universe and the Christian faith. 

Readers should not be put off by the title's similarity to The Davinci Code, which, despite Dan Brown's claim to the contrary, is pure fiction and a load of codswallop. Ward actually does a good job of demonstrating that Lewis (a) wrote according to a set of principles that, until Ward discovered them, had eluded literary critics and exegetes and (b) he deliberately concealed his plan. In other words, there actually is a "code" which can be "decoded," thereby yielding up new meaning to the reader who has figured out the code.

Decoding Narnia: the Medieval connection

To many modern readers, this will seem like a weird, sneaky thing to do, but it would not have seemed so to a medieval reader. What most modern critics have ignored is the fact that C. S. Lewis was a trained medievalist, and that, in scholarly circles, he is more famed and admired for his work as a medievalist than he is as a writer of children's stories or a Christian apologist (as he is known to most general readers). He wrote several books that should be familiar to college students, if they've ever studied medieval literature or history, and which help to support Ward's claim that Lewis's background as a scholar of medieval literarture is absolutely key to a thorough understanding of his Narnia tales.

As Lewis knew well, medieval
culture understood the metaphysical
complexity of the universe.

First in importance, there is The Discarded Image, in which Professor Lewis demonstrates how the medieval conception of the created order (the cosmos) profoundly influenced every aspect of medieval culture. Here's the publisher's blurb from the Canto edition of this book:

C.S. Lewis' The Discarded Image paints a lucid picture of the medieval world view, as historical and cultural background to the literature of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. It describes the "image" discarded by later ages as "the medieval synthesis itself, the whole organization of their theology, science and history into a single, complex, harmonious mental model of the universe." This, Lewis' last book, was hailed as "the final memorial to the work of a great scholar and teacher and a wise and noble mind."

One of the key elements of the "medieval world view" was the concept of plenitude, i.e., that the world we can see is just one small part of the whole of creation and there is a densely populated, but invisible order of Creation which is every bit as "real" and varied as the parts we can see. So in the medieval view the cosmos actually had different "levels," the visible and the invisible, which coexist side by side; in a somewhat similar way, the Bible was understood to have several layers of meaning, the literal or superficial meaning which would be plain to even the most casual reader, as well as spiritual (figurative or allegorical) meanings which lay, as St Augustine put it, "beneath the veil of the letter." The reading habit of looking for, and finding, various levels of meaning in the Bible bled over into reading of other kinds of writing as well, so that medieval poets (i.e., fiction writers) carefully planned and built many layers of significance into their works, and astute readers were adept at recognizing the "hidden" layers of meaning. Lewis, of course, knew this thoroughly, and knew that much of the delight in both writing and reading in the Middle Ages was derived from this kind of polysemous composition.

Readers must uncover (discover) the meaning

Medieval writers, in imitation of the Bible,
loved to hide their meaning
the surface.

Another work by Professor Lewis that should be familiar to students of medieval literature is The Allegory of Love , which traces the allegorical treatment of love in western European literature from the high Middle Ages through the Renaissance. Here again is evidence of the medieval delight in finding hidden meaning in literary works, and here again C. S. Lewis literally wrote the book on it. Both The Discarded Image and The Allegory of Love have been enormously influential in the modern study and teaching of medieval literature. And yet no modern scholar until Michael Ward has really understood how profoundly Lewis the writer was influenced by the medieval images and methods that preoccupied Lewis the scholar.

This idea of a literary work being conceived and composed according to an intricate plan is quite foreign to modern readers and writers alike. Recently I was introducing some students to Dante's Divine Comedy, a massive work composed according to a massively intricate plan structured by various numerological, theological, and typological schemata. I had made similar remarks on the structures of other medieval narrative poems we have studied. One student, who seemed surprised to realize how carefully medieval writers planned their compositions, asked me if modern writers do such careful planning, and I had to reply that this is seldom the case these days.

The Flammarion woodcut, in which a truth-seeker
peers into the hidden workings of the cosmos.

Modern novelists frequently write without any plan whatsoever and seem to think that this somehow makes a work more authentic -- they claim to "wait for their Muse" for inspiration, and then "let the characters take the story where it needs to go," as if novel writing were something that happens to the writer rather than something that the writer deliberately does (I blame William Wordsworth for this romantic tendency to regard the writer as a medium through which the forces of inspiration magically work). Even mystery writers will claim that they start their stories without knowing "whodunnit." What nonsense! Unfortunately, many readers and critics have assumed that Lewis wrote his Narnia novels using an equally haphazard method (or lack thereof). Thank goodness Michael Ward has finally vindicated Lewis in the face of critics who accuse him of having thrown Narnia together using a meaningless hodgepodge of images (Santa in Narnia? Crazy!).

By the way, when I got a beautiful new hand-tooled leather cover from Oberon Designs for my Kindle ereader, I chose a design that caught my imagination because it seemed to sum up for me the wonder of reading, allowing us to glimpse the inner workings of the universe. I didn't realize at the time that the image was based on a well-known pseudo-medieval engraving known as the Flammarion engraving (see image at the top of this post). Whether the image is a forgery made in the nineteenth century or not, it captures nicely the medieval belief in the invisible but magnificent reality of the created order that remains invisible to human eyes. This is a much richer conception than the scientfic worldview, which denies any unobservable, metaphysical reality. Anyway, the Flammarion image makes for a beautiful Kindle cover --- check it out!

Roof of Heaven Kindle cover by Oberon Designs

©2012 Lisa A. Nicholas

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