Abstract
The words ‘fighting for Narnia’ are taken from the final volume of C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia. In The Last Battle, Jill and Eustace have been sent into the magic land of Narnia to help the king in the final battle to save the country. As they realise that they will certainly be killed, Jill makes the comment that she would ‘rather be killed fighting for Narnia than grow old and stupid at home and perhaps go about in a bath-chair and then die in the end just the same’.1
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Notes
C. S. Lewis, The Last Battle (Harmondsworth, Middx: Puffin, 1964), p. 88.
C. S. Lewis, Letters, ed. Walter Hooper (London: Collins Fount, 1988) pp. 496, 497 (letters to ‘Mrs Arnold’ and Mrs Margaret Gray). He may well have read or dipped into Kierkegaard’s The Present Age, tr. Alexander Dru and Walter Lowrie (London: Oxford University Press, 1940). This volume, which also included Kierkegaard’s Two Minor Ethico-Religious Treatises, had an introduction by Charles Williams, close friend of Lewis and member of the Inklings literary group at Oxford. Williams very probably drew Lewis’s attention to Williams’ account of Kierkegaard in his book The Descent of the Dove (London: Religious Book Club, 1939) pp. 212–19.
See here Alan Keightley, Wittgenstein, Grammar and God (London: Epworth Press, 1976), ch. 5; ‘The Question of Reductionism’ (pp. 122–38).
Humphrey Carpenter, The Inklings (London: Unwin, 1981) p. 7.
Evan K. Gibson, C. S. Lewis, Spinner of Tales (Christian University Press, 1980) p. 164;
Paul L. Holmer, C. S. Lewis: The Shape of his Faith and Thought (London: Sheldon Press, 1977) pp. 22–3.
See T. G. A. Baker, What is the New Testament? (London: SCM, 1969) pp. 18–19, where the kerygma, a kind of primitive creed put together from statements in the Pauline epistles and Acts, is summarised in the following terms.
See ‘Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What’s to be Said’, in C. S. Lewis, Of This and Other Worlds, ed. Walter Hooper (London: Collins Fount, 1982) pp. 72–3.
C. S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (Harmondsworth, Middx: Puffin, 1965) p. 209. See also
C. S. Lewis, Letters to Children, ed. Lyle W. Dorsett and Marjorie Lamp Mead (London: Collins Fount, 1986) pp. 92–3 (letter to Patricia).
See for example C. S. Lewis, Perelandra (New York: Macmillan, 1965) In Perelandra Lewis attempts to depict a world in which man is tempted but does not fall. Man, in this case a woman, the Lady of the planet, is tempted by the Devil through Weston, but instead of the Lady defeating Weston through moral resistance, Weston is conveniently disposed of by Ransom, who kills him in combat. Thus Lewis has to deal with a double problem: the basic problem of traditional Fall doctrine that he takes over from the Christian tradition, and the problem of the deficiency of his Fall prevention in Perelandra.
C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1940) and Miracles (1947; London: Collins Fount, 1982); Carpenter, The Inklings, pp. 216–7.
Cf. C. S. Lewis, Timeless at Heart, ed. Walter Hooper (London: Collins Fount, 1987) pp. 103–4 (in ‘Religion without Dogma?’, where a short account of Lewis’s replies to Elizabeth Anscombe is given). In The Problem of Pain Lewis offers a proof of the existence of God based on man’s apprehension of the ‘numinous’ or spiritual, and on human awareness of an abstract moral law. Lewis then came to add to this the idea that reason, the part of the mind that makes moral decisions, is directly related to the moral law and to God. In Miracles he went even further, trying to prove the existence of God by demonstrating the existence of reason as independent of the rest of the human mentality. Cf. also
C. S. Lewis, ‘Men without Chests’, in The Abolition of Man (1943; London: Collins Fount, 1978) pp. 14–17 on ‘The Tao’.
Carpenter, The Inklings, pp. 216–17; C. S. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms (1958; London: Collins Fount, 1977).
C. S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (Harmondsworth, Middx: Puffin, 1959); CUP, p. 181.
A number of people have been misled by Kierkegaard’s lack of emphasis on the actual state of life after death and mistakenly think that he did not believe in it other than as a controlling picture by which to live. See for example D. Z. Phillips, Death and Immortality (London: Macmillan, 1970) esp. pp. 49, 57, 69;
also Don Cupitt, The Sea of Faith (London: BBC, 1984) p. 153:
Journal of the History of European Ideas, 12, no. 1 (1990).
C. S. Lewis, God in the Dock, ed. Walter Hooper (London: Collins Fount, 1979) pp. 79–84, esp. 81, 84.
Though it can be argued that Lewis uses the method of indirect communication in The Screwtape Letters (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1942).
On Kierkegaard’s task see Pap. XI. 2 A 21, 250. See also C. S. Lewis, Christian Reflections, ed. Walter Hooper (London: Collins Fount, 1981) p. 8. Talking to Hooper ‘about the spiritual bankruptcy we saw around us’, Lewis said, ‘Our civilization was built upon Christian morals and nourished by the Faith of the Apostles. It was rather like a huge bank account to which many contributed and which everyone has drawn upon. Now, we know that you cannot go on writing cheques on an account unless you continue to add to its capital. The trouble is that, without adding to that capital, we continue to write cheques. One day that capital will run out.’
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Watkin, J. (1992). Fighting for Narnia: Søren Kierkegaard and C. S. Lewis. In: Pattison, G. (eds) Kierkegaard on Art and Communication. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-22472-2_10
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