Metaphor and the Nature of Meaning in Lewisian Thought

Clive Staples Lewis (1898-1963)

The power of metaphor can hardly be overstated. Former editor of Time magazine's Europe office, James Geary, suggests that metaphor "is not just confined to art and literature but is at work in all fields of human endeavor, from economics and advertising, to politics and business, to science and psychology."¹ This notion attracted C. S. Lewis, and is one that he dealt with frequently throughout his work. In Miracles, Lewis writes, "The truth is that if we are going to talk at all about things which are not perceived by the senses, we are forced to use language metaphorically. Books on psychology or economics or politics are as continuously metaphorical as books of poetry or devotion."² If Geary's premise is to be taken as true, that metaphor is at work in all fields of human endeavor, then, as Lewis demonstrates, metaphor is most certainly at work in the realm of theology. In fact, if this assumption is presupposed, then the implications for the bearing of metaphor on theological reflection are vast and extremely important.

Metaphor and the Organ of Meaning

Lewis understood the surprising and terribly efficient power that metaphor could wield. In his little-known essay in critical theory, "Bluspels and Flalansferes: A Semantic Nightmare," Lewis extrapolates on the importance of metaphor to man's ability to ascribe meaning. This essay is the logical starting point for dealing with the role of metaphor in Lewisian thought in particular, for in it he posits in plain language a contrast seen clearly throughout the corpus of his work. "I am a rationalist," he writes. "For me, reason is the natural organ of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning. Imagination, producing new metaphors or revivifying old, is not the cause of truth, but its condition."³ Here, Lewis demonstrates the stark difference between thinking (perhaps reasoning works better) and imagining; in other words, Lewis differentiates between ideas and images.

The relationship between metaphor and imagination is nuanced, but the subtle points are critical in understanding how Lewis will develop metaphor in his works. Insofar as Lewis identifies the imagination as the "organ of meaning," he will attempt to demonstrate that the ability of the imagination to actually ascribe meaning—the ability to connect images (or, symbols) to ideas—lays the groundwork for reasoning of any sort. He writes,

When we pass beyond pointing to individual sensible objects, when we begin to think of causes, relations, of mental states or acts, we become incurably metaphorical. We apprehend none of these things except through metaphor … Our only choice is to use the metaphors and thus to think something, though less than we could wish; or else to be driven by unrecognized metaphors and so think nothing at all.

Such recognition leads Lewis to conclude that, "all our truth, or all but a few fragments, is won by metaphor."⁴ In a very practical sense, what Lewis speaks of is the ability of the imagination to connect images that are not necessarily to be taken as literally true to nevertheless convey ideas that are as true as truth can be. Thus, for Lewis, the discussion of metaphor is a discussion concerning meaning. In some ways, in many ways, metaphor takes one into truth in ways that literalities—not because they are untrue, but because they are literal—cannot, precisely because of meaning (given that the metaphor is an apt one).

The true metaphor, then, might be accurate without being necessarily literal. The accurate metaphor succeeds in capturing truth which, when further abstracted by reason, loses some of its clarity. In everyday conversation, one might be heard saying, "Don't carry this metaphor too far, it will eventually break down." This seems to be the very point Lewis is making. While metaphors might certainly break down when abstracted further into reason, Lewis is simply highlighting that the metaphor not further abstracted might nonetheless contain a very profound truth. In fact, Lewis suggests, it is very likely that all truth might be won through accurate metaphors not abstracted by reliance on reason alone. Rather, good reasoning accounts for the truth of the meaning contained within the accurate metaphor. For Lewis, many of the ways human beings come to understand God is through metaphor.

This is an approach that is favored quite heavily by the writers of Scripture to communicate truth. There are several metaphors in Scripture that are decently well known. Christ's famous "I am" statements from the gospel of John are rife with metaphorical language. The Psalms contain a number of metaphors, notably to compare God to a fortress, or a rock.⁵ To clarify literal terms, it is understood that Jesus Christ is not himself an actual loaf of bread, or that God himself is not a divine Stonehenge. But what these instances from Scripture demonstrate is the point Lewis makes—the ability of metaphor to stoke the imagination, to paint in stronger colors and define with crystalline clarity a truth that might otherwise be won with a lesser degree of potency.

Metaphor as the Language of Meaning

Thus it might be said that, for Lewis, metaphor is the language of meaning. "We can make our language duller," Lewis states in an essay presented to the Socratic Club on November 6, 1944, "[but] we cannot make it less metaphorical. We can make the pictures more prosaic; we cannot be less pictorial … In other words, all language about things other than physical objects is necessarily metaphorical."⁶ Viewing metaphor as the language of meaning becomes a necessary component for understanding not only the nature of meaning of Lewis's works, but also for understanding Lewis's own epistemology.

It is important to understand that Lewis does not attempt to favor imagination over intellect, or vice versa. Rather, both are incredibly important, necessitating that that they be viewed correctly. As already mentioned, Lewis developed the idea that the imagination must be dealt with first, because it is the mechanism through which the meaning of something is grasped. Therefore, when it comes to probing the Divine, if the words of Paul to the Corinthian church are to be taken with all the gravity in which they were intended, then for those who now "see in a mirror dimly," metaphor is imperative for grasping that which is both unfamiliar and remote. No more is this readily apparent than in one's attempt to understand the supernatural. And, as Lewis demonstrates at multiple points across his literary works, to accurately grasp the supernatural is to push one “further up and further in” to meaning itself.

Meaning and The Chronicles of Narnia

Though somewhat counterintuitive, perhaps the best place to begin when examining the treatment of meaning in The Chronicles of Narnia comes at the very end of the series. At the close of The Last Battle, the final book in the series, Aslan says to the humans, "There was a real railway accident … Your father and mother and all of you are—as you used to call it in the Shadowlands—dead. The term is over: the holidays have begun. The dream is ended; this is the morning."⁷ For the reader who has tracked the story through the entire series, there is a startling recognition here: what Lewis, through Aslan, identifies as "the Shadowlands" is, in actuality, the "real" world from which the main characters come. The point Lewis is making is that the current reality in which we inhabit is a mere "shadow" of the world to come. In a sense, this world is a metaphor in and of itself for the world to come.

Now, this notion of metaphor is not fully realized until the recreation of Narnia itself is taken into account. After Aslan has set about recreating the world of Narnia, Lewis takes a moment to contrast the old with the new: "The new one was a deeper country: every rock and flower and blade of grass looked as if it meant more."⁸ It is the curious usage of the word "meant" here that becomes crucial for understanding how Lewis has developed his notion of metaphor throughout this series. As the new Narnia comes into being, meaning itself becomes more actualized. Truth, it would seem, for Lewis, is merely a statement that corresponds to reality. But meaning is what determines the initial statement. This corresponds to Lewis's notion that imagination—the ability to ascribe meaning—is the condition of truth. To extrapolate just a bit further, the point Lewis is making about this present reality is that, at some future point in time, when heaven and earth are reconciled, it is almost as if fact is transformed into meaning.

Meaning and The Space Trilogy

This same notion is captured in a singular instance in the final book of Lewis's science fiction series, That Hideous Strength. While the first two books draw up the mythos that is to define the series, this book gradually redefines the mythos before detailing the resolution. Famously panned by Lewis's friend J. R. R. Tolkien for its reliance on their mutual friend Charles Williams and his writings, That Hideous Strength is something of a curious conclusion to the series. Yet the book also provides a startling insight into how Lewis handled meaning in his works, in many ways a better example than in his more popular Narnia stories.

Up to this point, the central character of the first two books, Elwin Ransom, has ventured to Mars and Venus, where he has learned the story of man's oppression at the hands of dark spiritual forces. In That Hideous Strength, the plot of which unfurls on planet Earth, the reawakened Merlin of Arthurian lore becomes the vector through which angelic, heavenly beings will aid man in overcoming the dark forces oppressing them in the form of a government agency tastefully (or distastefully, depending on the reader) acronymed N. I. C. E. The utter outlandishness of the plot aside, the moment the angelic being named Mercury descends on Merlin, Lewis writes,

For Ransom, whose study had been for many years in the realm of words, it was heavenly pleasure. He found himself sitting within the very heart of language, in the white-hot furnace of essential speech. All fact was broken, splashed into cataracts, caught, turned inside out, kneaded, slain, and reborn as meaning.

Again, fact becomes meaning.⁹ The recurring point of Lewis’s work, present in The Last Battle and here again in That Hideous Strength, is the notion that, when confronted with the Divine, the seemingly benign things of this present reality begin to mean more. Meaning becomes a key element of supernatural manifestation, and the impression one gets when reading Lewis is that dealing with meaning in such a way presses one deeper into truth.

Myth, Metaphor, and Meaning

As already pointed out, in Lewisian thought, statements that are true are simply meanings concerning reality abstracted from reality. In other words, truth statements are those statements that simply correspond to reality. But there is another type of meaning, what might be termed a "deeper" meaning, which is reached through myth. Such meaning is not necessarily reached through language. In fact, all of language could fade away and the core mythic qualities still communicate—accurately—the intended meaning.

Nowhere is Lewis’s understanding of metaphor and its relation to the nature of meaning more apparent than in his understanding of myth. In his essay "Myth Became Fact," Lewis points out that the "intellect is incurably abstract," and draws a hardline between experience and intellectually apprehending that experience. "You cannot study Pleasure in the moment of the nuptial embrace, nor repentance while repenting." Yet in "the enjoyment of a great myth we come nearest to experiencing as a concrete what can otherwise be understood only as an abstraction."¹⁰ What Lewis suggests is that myth is the thing that draws one closer to truth and pulls one deeper into reality. This forms the basis of accepting Christianity as the "true myth."

The point of connection between myth, metaphor, and meaning in Lewisian thought is summed up nicely by Peter W. Macky in his 1981 essay "The Role of Metaphor in Christian Thought and Experience as Understood by Gordon Clark and C. S. Lewis." In this essay, he traces Lewis’s development of metaphor to conclude that there is a spectrum of language through which truth can be accessed. "Metaphor," he writes, "is most at home in the poetic type (including religious speech), for that is the way to speak of supersensible human experiences." This is precisely the function Lewis ascribed to metaphor, the ability to make clear a supernatural reality. "It is best done by appealing to the imagination, using metaphors that enable us to taste reality rather than just talk about it."¹¹ And this notion of "tasting reality" rather than just talking about it is the key component of myth. Myth is capable of "speaking" without necessarily abstracting. To ascribe meaning to myth is to do so intuitively, rather than analytically, thus requiring the power of imagination.

In myth, the analytical abstractions from reality about reality must necessarily give way to something that can be experienced as concrete in myth itself; that is to say, a mythic "truth" is not one that corresponds to reality, but is, in fact, reality itself. Myth, like the new Narnia, purely means. And this realization, like the realization of Ransom in That Hideous Strength, enables one to experience truth in a way that goes beyond merely talking about it, while at the same time communicating truth in new and profound ways.
                                        

1 James Geary, I is an Other: The Secret Life of Metaphor and How It Shapes the Way We See the World (New York: Harper, 2011), 3.

2 C. S. Lewis, "Horrid Red Things," in Miracles, revised ed. (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2015), 115.

3 C. S. Lewis, "Bluspels and Flalansferes: A Semantic Nightmare," in Selected Literary Essays by C. S. Lewis, ed. Walter Hooper (Cambridge: University Press, 1969), 265.

4 Ibid., 263-265.

5 Jn. 6:35, 8:12ff; Ps. 18:2 NASB.

6 C. S. Lewis, "Is Theology Poetry?" in The Weight of Glory, revised ed. (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2001), 133-134.

7 C. S. Lewis, The Last Battle, reprint ed. (New York: HarperCollins, 2002), 228.

8 Ibid., 213.

9 C. S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength, reprint ed. (New York: Scribner, 2003), 319.

10 C. S. Lewis, "Myth Became Fact" in God in the Dock (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2014), 57.

11 Peter W. Macky, "The Role of Metaphor in Christian Thought and Experience as Understood by Gordon Clark and C. S. Lewis," JETS 24, no. 3 (1981): 246.