A Deep and Healing Platonism

The Narnia Books as Motivational Texts

There are so many negative forces trying to colonise our minds today. Marketing and advertising to begin with. Political ideologies too, as well as online celebrities and self-styled influencers. There are so many more. To make matters worse, things which formerly gave us ballast and support and basic orientation have been greatly weakened these past few decades. It's harder now than it was in 1980, say, to feel a deep and nourishing connection to a wider communal reality. We used to take this sense of collective belonging for granted. Now it's much less obvious.

Such instability and insubstantiality make it hard for us to properly take stock of who we are, where we’re going, and what we’re truly made for. It’s very easy, however, for bad actors to stake a claim on us and kid us that we’re thinking our own thoughts and ‘doing our own thing’ when really we’re puppets on someone else’s string. And if we don’t have a strong sense of self, if we don’t have a solid grasp of who we are and what we stand for - if there’s a gap where authentic personhood should be - then this is how we’ll end up - as prey for The Mind Parasites to quote the title of Colin Wilson’s 1967 novel.

It’s a godsend then that the Narnia books have been with us all the way through this tricky time. I would recommend them to anyone feeling lost or confused or underdeveloped as a person or just blown around by the cross-currents of contemporary life. There are themes, images and symbols here that will guide you home, back to your true self and that bigger, wider reality that once you knew but now seem to have lost.

For me it’s the Platonism in these stories rather than the Christianity (though the two dovetail beautifully together) that gives Narnia its special ability to reorientate us towards what is good, beautiful and true. Martha C. Sammons expresses this superbly in A Guide Through Narnia (1979). It is worth quoting from That length because what she says here (pp.66-69) gets right to the heart of the matter :

Plato believed that the real, stable, permanent part of the universe exists in a supernatural, super-sensible ‘heaven’ as Ideas or Forms. Thus the physical world is only the realm of appearances, rather than solid reality - illusory, transitory. In this way it is a shadow or copy of the ‘real world’ …

Platonism involves an aspiration, a longing, a crying out of the human soul from within the world we now know for a beauty which lies on the other side of existence … In his essay The Weight of Glory, Lewis says that ‘we all have a desire for a ‘far off country’ like an inconsolable inner pang - a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience.’ In fact, he says, we were actually made for another world. What more poignant illustration of this could there be than the magical tree from Narnia in The Magician’s Nephew that grows in Digory’s back yard but bends whenever a breeze blows in Narnia because of the Narnian sap running within it!

Perhaps we mistakenly identify what we long for as beauty or memory, but these are only ‘the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.’ In Narnia, the things we long for are associated with the distant mountains of Aslan’s country and the islands of the Utter East. After their unforgettable experience at the End of the World in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Edmund and Lucy cannot describe the smell and the musical sound carried on the sweet breeze from Aslan’s country. ‘It would break your heart.’ ‘Why,’ said I, ‘was it so sad?’ ‘Sad!! No,’ said Lucy.’

Digory experiences the same strange ‘echo’ during his first time in the Wood Between the Worlds. ‘If anyone had asked him: “Where did you come from?” he would probably have said, “I’ve always been here.” That was what it felt like - as if one had always been in that place.’ His and Polly’s life before this seems like a dream, a ‘picture’ in their heads. The former life of Strawberry the horse also seems muddled like a dream, and Aslan’s song reminds them all of ‘something.’ In The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe, after Peter, Edmund, Susan and Lucy are Kings and Queens in Narnia for many years, the ‘real world’ seems like a dream to them too …

Similarly, in The Horse and His Boy, after Aslan visits the children they feel as if awakened from sleep: ‘But there was a brightness in the air and on the grass, and a joy in their hearts, which assured them that he had been no dream.’ As the Telmarine in Prince Caspian feels the touch of Aslan’s breath, a new look comes into his eyes, ‘as if he were trying to remember something.’

By contrast, evil makes us forget. The White Witch cannot remember being in the Wood Between the Worlds - that ‘quiet place’ - no matter how often or how long she was there. Likewise in The Silver Chair when the gnome Gold says that the Green Witch called them to her world by magic and made them forget about their own world: “We didn’t know who we were or where we belonged. We couldn’t do anything, except what she put into our heads.’ Puddleglum has to denounce her evil, drowsy enchantment, which lures them into forgetting the real world, by reasoning, ‘Suppose we have dreamed, or made up, all those things - trees and grass and sun and moon and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones … We’re just babies making ups a game, if you’re right. But four babies playing a game can make a play-world which licks your real world hollow.’

But the world we dream of, or remember, or long for is. not ‘made-up.’ In Aslan’s country, beyond the Stable Door, ‘The dream is ended: this is the morning.’ Lewis uses the Stable Door not only in The Last Battle but also in several of his other writings as a symbol for the entrance to that Platonic reality which we have always longed for because we have vague Wordsworthian recollections of a past glory. We long to be ‘inside of some door which we have always seen from the outside … to be at last summoned inside would be both glory and honour beyond all our merits and also the healing of that old ache.’ Someday, says Lewis, we shall again be permitted to ‘get in … pass in through Nature, beyond her, into that splendour which she fitfully reflects.’

I would only add to the above that I don’t think either Lewis or Plato believed that the physical world we live in is 100% unreal. It’s real enough on its own level but the way we experience it is a long way short of what ultimate reality is like. The world’s not real enough. That’s the problem. It’s not solid enough or hard enough. So Heaven, for Lewis, is not some vague, abstract, disembodied place. On the contrary, it’s totally tangible - crystal clear and as hard and bright as a diamond. He illustrates this memorably in The Great Divorce where, until you have grown into the stature of someone who can ‘handle’ Heaven, you will struggle to cope with the sheer physicality of the place. You will cut your finger on a blade of grass and find yourself knocked to the ground by a leaf falling on your head! Everything is so real and solid there, and we in our current state are so ghostly and insubstantial in comparison.

We see this necessary process of ‘growing into reality’ start to unfold at the end of The Last Battle. The sun and moon are darkened and the stars fall from the sky as Aslan brings the wonderful world of Narnia to a close. The despondent children are then led ‘farther up and farther in’ through the Stable Door into a landscape which they eventually recognise as being that of Narnia itself - but a heightened, enhanced, clearer, sharper version of the Narnia they loved and which they have just been mourning:

This new Narnia was a deeper country: every rock and flower and blade of grass looked as if it meant more. I can’t describe it any better than that: if you ever get there you will know what I mean.

It was Jewel the Unicorn who summed up what everyone was feeling. He stamped his right fore-hoof on the ground and neighed and then cried:

‘I have come home at last! This is my real country! I belong here. This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now. The reason why we loved the old Narnia is that it sometimes looked a little like this. Bree-hee-hee! Come farther up, come farther in!’

You will know it when you see it then. Just like Jewel. You will recognise your home. And when (let’s be positive here!) you get there, ‘you will know what I mean.’ That’s the take-home message right there. Deep within yourself, you know innately what’s true and good and right, what’s beautiful, clean and honest. It’s the Platonic Heaven that you lived in before you were born, before you drank from the waters of Lethe and forgot your true home in the noise, confusion and dissimulation of this fallen, imperfect (though not irredeemable) world. The Narnia books are seven shafts of light that pierce the gloom and murkiness of our times - lighthouses on the shore that call you back to port and back to your true, essential self.

So, as an exercise in bibliotherapy, I would invite you to take just one of the Narnia tales to start with - any book; whichever appeals to you most right now - and read it slowly and reflectively over the next few days and weeks. Try, if you can, not to get too caught up in the storyline or the individual characters or even the explicit Christian motifs Lewis gives us. What we are looking for here are those images, symbols, themes and phrases that ‘remind us of something’ and that set the bell ringing inside us that calls us both backwards in time - towards our buried, forgotten past - and forward towards the brighter, more rounded, more fulfilling future that awaits us.

There is a deep and healing Platonism at work here. The Platonists themselves called it anamnesis - the great work of piercing through the mental fog that surrounds us and stepping out again into the fullness of being.

So sit with whatever speaks to you then for as long as it feels right and let it shape and inform your thoughts and actions over the next bit of time. See where it takes you. It’ll be somewhere good, that’s for sure. You can trust the Narnia books. You can smell the goodness on every page. They are seven sure guides. Seven shafts of light. Aslan’s country is always there for you - just inside the wardrobe door, in that picture of the sailing ship in your bedroom (as in The Voyage of The Dawn Treader), or (as in The Silver Chair) on the other side of the door in the outer wall, the one that’s always locked or has been since as long as anyone can remember. Until one day it isn’t, and then …

… what Eustace and Jill saw was quite different from what they had expected.

They had expected to see the grey, heathery slope of the moor going up and up to join the dull autumn sky. Instead, a blaze of sunshine met them. It poured through the doorway as the light of a June day pours into a garage when you open the door. It made the drops of water on the grass glitter like beads and showed up the dirtiness of Jill’s tear-stained face. And the sunlight was coming from what certainly did look like a different world - what they could see of it. They saw smooth turf, smoother and brighter than Jill had ever seen before, and blue sky, and darting to and fro, things so bright that they might have been jewels or huge butterflies.