Gravissimum educationis vita hominis
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Teaching Narnia: Christian Apologetics Through Fantasy Literature
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January 4, 2024Theology classrooms, though integral to the identity of any primary or secondary Catholic educational institution, are perhaps the spaces most often found wanting for the Catholic school student. Two images often identify the teacher of “religion”: the emotional educator and the encyclopedic educator. The first greets her student and, emboldened by the Spirit, shares an emotionally affective lesson which engages the student but fails to meet the intellectual end of proper theology, rendering her teaching detached from reason and, thus, incomplete. The second engages in academic pursuit of theological knowledge but fails to consider the spiritual affectivity of the Christian student, thus presenting theology as an uninteresting discipline with no teleological implication. In either case, the student is left with a half-painted portrait of the sacred science. Theology becomes for the student either purely emotional or purely academic. To be sure, the intellectual work of theology is of high priority; however, theology without belief is simply probative work of a material history or anthropology. Theology requires conforming the intellect and the desire (the will) to Christ.
This essay argues for the implementation of Christian literature in the theology classroom as a means of bridging the gap between the student’s intellectual assent to Truth and his grasping Truth within the recesses of his own heart. First, I examine the reason for studying theology: that is, to seek the knowledge of God who is the origin and end of created things and, thus, to attain belief in Him. Then, I evaluate C. S. Lewis’ dominant philosophical work, The Abolition of Man, which argues that contemporary students, in the face of Enlightened and rationalist thought, require a return to affective learning so as to recover their sense of humanity. I then offer the claim that literature, especially as introduced in the classroom, is the point of convergence between the affective and rational faculties of man. Finally, I trace Lewis’ major work, The Chronicles of Narnia, to glean some of the particular tropes which Lewis uses to enlighten the reader into the Truths of the faith through fantasy literature. Through this examination, it is clear that literature both offers students a novel approach to the faith and elicits from them a novel response to the faith, inviting them, as Lewis says, “Further up and further in!”[i]
This paper presupposes that Scripture is the primary mode of Catholic theological teaching and accordingly cannot be supplanted by any form of Christian literature, regardless of its canonical tenure (Dante) or acceptance in popular culture (Lewis, Chesterton). Introduction of supplemental literature must only be that: supplemental. Were literature to replace Scripture, the theology class would already be lost. My thesis also presupposes that the teacher himself can do nothing outside of Christ and can act only as an instrument of grace. The teacher cannot make the student fall in love with Christ; he can only lead by example and offer a space and teaching that encourages movement of the Spirit.
Reasons for Teaching Theology
The primary end of education is the pursuit of truth. Catholic theology is taught such that man might come to a knowledge of God as Truth so that he might freely live out his vocation. The Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith responds to the question of the vocation of the theologian by first identifying the role of theology in Donum Veritatis. The CDF offers that this discipline “frees men from isolation and the opposition in which they have been trapped by ignorance of truth” and, at the same time, “opens the way to God” and “unites them to each other.”[ii] Theology enlightens men, freeing them from the constraint of the material world; it opens for them the scope of their supernatural end, that is, that they might recognize their vocation to live as sons and daughters of the Creator God. Further, theology draws men together, recognizing the deepest commonality between them– their Creator and final end, to see God face to face.
In living out his vocation so as to seek this final end, the faithful must “continually reawaken or ‘rekindle’ its own life of faith” by “contemplating ever more deeply, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, the contents of the faith.”[iii] Catholic Christians are called to recognize the Church’s authority on these matters of the faith and are, thus, obliged to seek and receive the wisdom of Christ’s Bride. Accordingly, Christ’s Church cannot leave her members to their own devices. Recognizing the Holy Spirit’s movements in the Church, the Church extends outward to fulfill her call to “go out and make disciples of all nations” (Mt 28.19), so that all “might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing [they] may have life in his name” (Jn 20.31). Christ’s call to evangelization demands that we equip others to rekindle their own faith and contemplate the faith within their hearts. Should the Church fail in her mission to teach, she leaves the faithful empty-handed, without proper worship to offer unto God and with, at most, a trace of the Truth in their hearts.
In offering the study of theology in Catholic schools, the Church works toward fulfilling her mission of evangelization and provides for her students the path toward Christ; she invites her students to ask Christ to dwell in their hearts, and she teaches her students to participate in proper worship. Theology asks questions about God and provides answers to the deepest longings of the human heart. In this way, the study of theology draws man into freedom. If the student seeks a life in Christ, he is not asking what the world wants from him. He is not seeking answers to the enduring secular question of what man’s happiness consists in. He is not enslaved to the materialist philosophies that dominate popular culture. In studying theology properly, the student recognizes an inexhaustible discipline into the heart of the Father in order to embark on a journey of proper self-recovery, to give up the self, to allow Christ to give the student a “real, new self,” and, ultimately, to “look for Christ and … find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.”[iv] This is wisdom; Thomas Aquinas calls the man wise who probes the end of the universe and, thus, also its cause, finding God in his pursuit.[v] Theology is therefore of paramount importance in the Catholic schools; it teaches students who they are in the light of who the Father is: we are beloved and created for beatitude.
Inviting Students into an Emotional Assent to Theological Truth
Living the Christian vocation requires both an intellectual and emotional assent to faith; therefore, theology must be also presented as a matter of holding truth in the heart. Such emotional learning is unfortunately overlooked and, more often, held with disdain in contemporary educational systems. In an educational climate of “learning objectives” that call for “measurable learning outcomes,” educators are encouraged to break down and present their subject in disjointed parts seeking specific and empirical goals. Students, especially those in high school (the “rhetoric stage” of development) study within disciplines and do so without a particular attachment to their subject. Take this example: an educator’s learning outcome is that Students will be able to identify and analyze Wordsworth’s use of sound devices. The student begins reading Wordsworth with only this outcome in mind, finding alliteration but missing the imagistic genius of the great poet; thus, the student arguably has lost more reading Wordsworth than if he had never picked up this work. Consider more sinisterly in theology: Students will be able to identify and analyze the effect of diatribe through the New Testament epistles. Measurable? Certainly. Fruitful in bringing a student to love Christ and Scripture? Questionably.
C. S. Lewis addresses this same turn of education–that is, toward a singularly practical or objective end–in his The Abolition of Man; he calls for a reintroduction of emotional or affective learning in the classroom as requisite for re-humanizing man. In effective terminology, Lewis dubs modern men, “Men without chests,”[vi] indicating that men have been so greatly desensitized to beauty that they lack heart entirely. Lewis describes how the student does not intentionally become heart-less; rather, he is taught rightly that his emotions in themselves are illogical, but then wrongly categorizes them as unreasonable. This is the product of an educational pedagogy which “regard[s] all sentiments as equally non-rational … [and thus] either decide to remove all sentiments as far as possible from the pupil’s mind; or else to encourage some sentiments for reasons that have nothing to do with their intrinsic ‘justness’ or ‘ordinacy.’”[vii] Educators can fall into this chasm of apathy when asking students only practical questions without realizing the need for speculative work in the rhetoric stage.
Concretely, this may look like the “learning goal” that evaluates students and seeks empirical data without probative analysis; for example, it may be the factual or linguistic question along the lines of this one, “Students will be able to describe how the Sacraments of Initiation bring people into the Church.” This is not an unimportant question or goal, and an answer should be expected of all middle and high school students. At the same time, in the rhetoric level, where students are asked to embrace their own faith, there is a more important question to ask: “Why does it matter that you are baptized?” While the student should be able to recite the sacraments of initiation, it is far more important that they see themselves as baptized, initiated into the family of God, or else it may appear just another multiple-choice question on an exam that holds no bearing on the salvation of their souls.
For Lewis, asking the self-reflective questions is requisite to producing a virtuous man, but it is work that is not being done in schools today. He regards the operation of non-affective learning as a tragi-comedy whereby students are neither drawn to truth by love nor are particularly skilled in finding truth, and he recognizes the deeper hypocrisy that, by their education, these students are rendered incapable of achieving the qualities which their culture aims to produce in them. Lewis aptly says, “In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function.”[viii] He says that children cannot seek virtue unless they are able to be emotional. Children cannot love goodness without knowing love. And in this way, the role of the educator shifts from instruction to introduction–inviting students to enter into pursuit and love of truth. The educator must counterbalance the effect of practical education by inculcating sentimentality–thus bringing emotion into the classroom.
To be sure, encouraging practicality is a responsibility of the teacher; however, if a teacher does not communicate in equal if not greater proportion the speculative end of work as relating also to the emotional and affective parts of man, he does his student a disservice. Accordingly, it is requisite to find a mode of “irrigat[ing] deserts.”[ix] The most inviting place to do this is literature, given the capacity of literature to open doors into fantastical expressions of truth. Good literature necessarily renders the student vulnerable by its portrayal of truth through image and character. When a child learns to read, and to love reading, it is because he has been coerced through language to hold steadfastly to a narrative and to receive whatever internal morals and motifs that story communicates. In a rigorous humanities program, history textbooks and great literature are taught side-by-side as a means of converging the two disciplines (the former more encyclopedic and the latter more emotional) in a way that reaches both the logical and emotional ends of study. Such study invites the student to receive information both actively and passively. This is needed especially in theology.
The child’s reception of truth through literature is important in theology, for it allows the student to receive Christian teaching in a different, and perhaps even more interesting, way. The Catholic school student knows he will take theology classes through the entirety of his education; however, when offered literature in these courses, the students find that, rather than learning new skills as with disciplines such as mathematics, language, and grammar, they are asked to dive deeper into the subject. There is certainly something to be said for the developed skill to read and interpret Augustine or Aquinas, but for the rhetoric stage student, such skills have likely been developed over time and are not emphasized in the theology classroom as much as in a humanities or philosophy course. Theology is properly an inwardly, not laterally, moving discipline. And most significantly it seems that students expect their theology classes to move laterally. For instance, the student knows that in his freshman year he will be asked to learn the Beatitudes just as he has been asked to recite them each year since the fourth grade. When the work of memorization is re-done, and successful marks made on the exam, there is still no promise that he will love, accept, and adapt the Beatitudes, discerning why God blesses the poor and what such blessing communicates about God.
Adapting Lewis to the Classroom
This sort of probative work can be accomplished through introduction of Christian literature in tandem with a textbook. C. S. Lewis identifies his work as a supposal of the Christian narrative; it is not an allegory. The reader still gleans from this work Christian themes including responding to grace, living out heroic virtue, acknowledging true kingship, adoring God and His creation as well as the eschatological recreation of the new heavens and earth, and following the true God.
Lewis also becomes especially fitting when reading alongside a theology curriculum. Where a textbook aptly teaches themes like Creation ex nihilo and the gravity of Christ’s victory over death, these same themes are found in the body of the Chronicles. Taking first the example of C. S. Lewis’ The Magician’s Nephew and secondly The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, it is clear that Lewis’ imagery engages the emotion of the student and reveals the same theological truths of creation and resurrection but is neither redundant nor erroneous. Instead, they invite a student to imagine theological truth as true, good, and beautiful, rather than an “achieved learning outcome.”
It is evident that of creation, students must know that God created all things out of nothing. As first cause and first mover, He Himself is neither caused nor moved. He created through the Word, an intelligible, organizing principle we recognize as the Second Person of the Trinity. It is in the Spirit that creation occurs. Captured in Genesis and later in the Prologue of John’s Gospel, the creation narrative bears with it a number of images that students must become familiar with. Once Scriptural identification and probing has been accomplished, consider C. S. Lewis’ portrayal of this mystery of creation (as occurring in Narnia):
In the darkness something was happening at last. A voice had begun to sing … Sometimes it seemed to come from all directions at once. Sometimes he almost thought it was coming out of the earth beneath them. Its lower notes were deep enough to be the voice of the earth itself … Then two wonders happened at the same moment. One was that the voice was suddenly joined by other voices … The second wonder was that the blackness overhead, all at once, was blazing with stars … one moment there had been nothing but darkness; next moment a thousand, thousand points of light leaped out – single starts, constellations, and planets, brighter and bigger than any in our world.[x]
Lewis cannot effectively portray creation of nothing; such is an impossible task to the finite mind. But here, through the image of a song and a song that creates, Lewis invites his reader to interpret a voice, an organized voice, as The Word and a myriad of voices as God’s creative work expands. Where there was blackness, now stars, God creating the heavens and the earth. From this passage alone, students recognize song. Again, where Scripture is the most vital resource, a reader is able, through Narnia, to draw deeper into mystery through an alternative, good and beautiful image– a song.
From Creation, Lewis draws out the Chronicles through salvation history. In The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, there is a type of savior who offers his life for another; this savior is blameless, good, and compassionate. And after he is sacrificed by evil on the table, he is resurrected. Students must, in theology classes, recognize that the God who preexisted all things took a body and died in that body, and it is for this reason that he could conquer death. Lewis’ explanation regards the evil Witch and the good Lion (Aslan) and is given by Aslan to the two Pevensie girls. Aslan says,
Though the Witch knew the deep Magic, there is a magic deeper still which she did not know: Her knowledge goes back only to the dawn of time. But if she coud have looked a little further back, into the stillness and darkness before Time dawned … She would have known that when a willing victim who had committed no treachery was killed in a traitor’s stead, the Table would crack and Death itself would start working backwards.[xi]
From this passage, one gleans the image of the savior from before all of created time and death as defeated. Providing a major selection from the text itself offers students the opportunity to engage their imaginations, relating what they’ve read to what they already know, and in that, seeking and connecting with truth in a way that was perhaps inaccessible before. There is no “magic” in the Cross, but of course love is the kind of “magic” at play here. Lewis’ portrayal of love offers a supposal of Christ’s resurrection–connecting the reader to love as the driving force of the crucifixion.
Concluding Remarks
While such examples from Lewis are only fragments of the many texts that can be used for further teaching of theology, they present an opportunity for movement outside of a standard textbook curriculum. Such movement is necessary if the teacher aims to reach both goals of his subject: to instruct the student in it and to encourage the student to love it. This first end is self-evident, the second much harder to achieve. The importance of teaching theology lies principally in this second end: if a student learns to treat God as subject only, without greater love or devotion, then his theological education is simply relegated to another core study.
In schools, theology is taught to draw students to life in Christ. Life in Christ involves a logical assent (to seek truth) and an emotional assent (to love truth). For Lewis, this becomes difficult in the classroom as students are given so fragmented an education that they are unaccustomed to seeing what they are taught in the classroom as relevant to their own lives. The logical impulse of their study– seeking instruction without wisdom– provides no fertile environment for loving truth. The return must thus be affective. The student must be given an emotionally inciteful education that allows him to recover his heart. Rediscovering emotion is done most effectively through good literature, and perhaps most especially in such palatable literature as The Chronicles of Narnia. Although sometimes uncomplicated, Christian literature invites its reader to consider and internalize themes of the Christian life without the encyclopedic treatment of a textbook, as seen from the brief treatment of The Magician’s Nephew and The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.
If theological education, both inside the classroom and outside (in the home, the liturgy, and the sacraments) can convince a student that it is worth his life to follow Christ, then his education has done him well. While this is an arduous task, the teacher remembers he is not alone or even personally responsible for the student’s conversion. Rather, he is responsible for providing an environment which encourages the student to be open to grace, that he might hear the voice of Christ who always speaks to him and awaits his response, that he might have “life in his name” (John 20:31).
Ms. Beckerman teaches theology at Donahue Academy in Ave Maria, Florida.
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[i] C. S. Lewis, The Last Battle, from The Chronicles of Narnia (New York: Macmillan, 2001), 761.[ii] Joseph Ratzinger and Alberto Bovone, “Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith: Instruction Donum Veritatis on the Ecclesial Vocation of the Theologian,” Vatican Website, March 24, 1990, https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_19900524_theologian-vocation_en.html, sec. 3.[iii] Ratzinger and Bovone, Donum Veritatis, sec. 5.[iv] C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Samizdat, 2014), 120.[v] Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles 1.1, https://aquinas.cc/la/en/~SCG1.C1.[vi] C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (New York: Macmillan, 1947), 1.[vii] Lewis, The Abolition of Man, 13.[viii] Lewis, The Abolition of Man, 16.[ix] Lewis, The Abolition of Man, 9.[x] C. S. Lewis, The Magician’s Nephew (New York: Macmillan, 1966), 59.[xi] C.S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (New York: Macmillan, n.d.), 86-87.
