A-TEAM, THE

You say that Bacchus and Silenus are 'clearly jovial characters'.  Why?  Is it that they are festive?  Festivity is definitely an important feature of Joviality, but we must understand what kind of festivity we're talking about!  The festivity of Jove is kingly, leisured, serene, majestic, regal; it comes in the wake of priceless sacrifice.  The festivity of Mars is tied to a different set of qualities: it's Bacchanalian, sensual, reckless.  It's very close to drunkenness!  It's more of a riot than a feast.  It's the sort of abandonment to pleasure that comes as the backswing to physical risk, - like Orual's deep drinking after her single combat in 'Till We Have Faces'.  It's like the sap surging up through the trees in March. 

I have addressed some of Devin Brown's concerns in a conversation we've been having on Narniaweb. 

Why do you believe Lewis only emphasized one planet per novel?

One's enough!  In 'That Hideous Strength' the planetary themes are numerous and they get in the way of each other.  Lewis himself thought that 'That Hideous Strength' was overstuffed.  Better to concentrate on one planet at a time, as he does in the Chronicles.

As the rest of the series are adapted to the big screen, what influence do you think your discoveries should have on the movies?

I hope that 'Planet Narnia' will convince the screenwriters that the Chronicles are very carefully constructed novels.  They were not just slopped together and dashed off in five minutes one afternoon!  If the screenwriters realise how much thought and creative intelligence went into Lewis's composition of the Chronicles, hopefully it will cause them to respect and understand their source material more and stop them from making some of the unnecessary changes which they introduced in the first two films.

One reviewer of Planet Narnia, Rachel Fulton, claimed that your discoveries require a reconsideration of more than just the Chronicles. Seeing as most Lewis scholars have been convinced of your thesis, how do you think your discoveries will impact the general study of C.S. Lewis?

I hope that 'Planet Narnia' will contribute to an understanding of Lewis as a more integrated writer and thinker than people have generally recognised. 

1) Mars is the god of war and Prince Caspian is a war story. The four Pevensie children find that they have arrived in Narnia ?in the middle of a war?. The war in question is ?the Great War of Deliverance?, as it is referred to in a later Chronicle, or simply the ?Civil War? in Lewis?s ?Outline of Narnian History?. It is ?a real war to drive Miraz out of Narnia? and restore the kingdom to Caspian. At the start of the story he is a mere boy, hardly aware of the Martial spirit which is already abroad. When Glenstorm tells Caspian: ?I and my sons are ready for war. When is the battle to be joined??, Caspian replies that he had ?not been thinking of a war?. Glenstorm asks why it is, then, that he goes ?clad in mail and girt with sword?; he informs him that the omens are good: the planets foretell success. Nerved for the conflict, Caspian thinks it ?quite possible that they might win a war and quite certain that they must wage one?, so he convenes a ?Council of War?. The Council authorizes action and Caspian leads the skirmishing forces as they engage the usurper?s army. Once the Pevensies arrive, Peter challenges Miraz to ?monomachy?. Miraz is killed, not by Peter as it turns out, but by one of his own side, after which ?full battle? is joined.

2) Mars makes you ?martial?, and the very word ?martial? appears twice in ?Prince Caspian?, the only one of the seven Chronicles in which it occurs at all. Reepicheep is described as a ?martial mouse? and Miraz frets over his ?martial policy?.

3) In his study of sixteenth-century literature, Lewis quotes Sir John Bourchier: ?I know by the course of the planettes that there is a Knyght comynge?. In Prince Caspian he dramatises that sentence. Glenstorm tells Caspian, ?The time is ripe. I watch the skies . . . Tarva and Alambil have met in the halls of high heaven?. Tarva, the Lord of Victory, ?salutes? Alambil, the Lady of Peace, in a conjunction witnessed by Caspian and his tutor, Dr. Cornelius, who declares: ?Their meeting is fortunate and means some great good for the sad realm of Narnia?. The conjunction tells us that there is, indeed, ?a knight coming?, - namely Peter, who will fight the tyrant Miraz and right the wrongs under which Narnia suffers

4) Knightliness is one of the key, recurring images throughout the story: we hear of ?knights-errant?; in the ruins of Cair Paravel we see ?rich suits of armour, like knights guarding the treasures?; Peter is ?Knight of the Most Noble Order of the Lion?; Edmund is ?Knight of the Noble Order of the Table?, a ?very dangerous knight?; Caspian is knighted and then, in turn, knights Trufflehunter, Trumpkin and Reepicheep; even the chess piece discovered at the start of the story is a ?chess-knight?. This War of Deliverance is a good, medieval, knightly conflict, formalised by the art of heraldry and the rules of chivalry; hence the shining armour, the banners, the ornamented shields, the elevated language of Peter?s challenge.

Peter is the model knight, able to hew the treacherous and murderous Sopespian in pieces (slashing his legs from under him and walloping off his head with the backswing of the same stroke), but gentle enough to kiss the furry head of the badger. He has physical courage (risking his body in the single combat) but also pays attention to forgotten and seemingly unimportant traditions (the Bears? hereditary right to be Marshals). He is sensitive to his army?s morale (cheering up Wimbleweather by appointing him to the parley); adroit in decision-making (his handling of the bumptious Reepicheep is diplomatic); and self-effacing towards Caspian (?I haven?t come to take your place, you know, but to put you into it?). He demonstrates the summit of knightliness in refusing to attack Miraz when he is down; this to the frustration of Edmund: ?Oh, bother, bother, bother. Need he be as gentlemanly as all that? I suppose he must. Comes of being a Knight and a High King?. This is that knightly behaviour, which Lewis wrote about elsewhere, ?in which morality up to the highest self-sacrifice and manners down to the smallest gracefulness in etiquette were inextricably blended by the medieval ideal?. For more about this tradition of knighthood, take a look at Lewis?s essay, ?The Necessity of Chivalry?.

5) The Martial temperament is one of ?sturdy hardiness?, according to Lewis?s book, The Discarded Image, and the Martial visage is ?hard and happy?, according to his poem, ?The Planets?. This ?hard virtue of Mars? (to quote his poem, ?The Adam at Night?) appears frequently throughout Prince Caspian: Peter looks ?hard? at Lucy; the soldiers escorting Trumpkin have faces that are ?bearded and hard?; we meet three badgers called the ?Hardbiters?; when the children are lost in the woods they find that retracing their steps was ?hard work, but oddly enough everyone felt more cheerful?; Aslan tells Lucy ?it is hard for you [to wake the others] . . . it has been hard for us all?; Peter?s army at the end of the battle are found ?breathing hard . . . with stern and glad faces?. More significantly, certain characters visibly become Martial as the story progresses: Caspian begins ?to harden? as he sleeps ?under the stars?; the children, ?jingling in their mail?, begin to look and feel more like Narnians and less like schoolchildren; the ?hard? ground and ?the air of Narnia? work on Edmund so that ?all his old battles came back to him?; he and Peter have become ?more like men than boys? by the time they march to Aslan?s How. The iron has entered their soul, as is to be expected, for these characters are responsive to the Martial ?influnce?, to that same ?magic in the air? that has saved Susan?s bowstring from perishing.

6) In addition to being the god of war (Mars Gradivus), Mars was a god of trees and forests. He was known in this capacity as ?Mars Silvanus?. This explains why trees have such an important part to play in Prince Caspian. Lewis puts ?Silvans? into his cast of characters in this story; they never again appear in any other Narnia Chronicle. Caspian and Dr. Cornelius cannot clearly see the conjunction of Tarva and Alambil because of the interposition of a tree; Cornelius repeatedly mentions waking the trees; Caspian is brought to Trufflehunter?s cave by the intervention of a falling tree; Trufflehunter laments that they cannot ?wake the spirits of these trees? for ?once the Trees moved in anger, our enemies would go mad with fright?; Aslan?s How now stands in the middle of ?the Great Woods? and there Caspian?s army must flee; Lucy tries to wake the trees in Chapter 9, but fails; in Chapter 10 the children?s progress is hampered by the fir wood, but it provides them with cover when they have to run from the arrows of Miraz?s sentries; later in Chapter 10 Lucy, at night-time, finds the trees awake in the presence of Aslan; in Chapter 11 the trees stir at the sound of his roar and then join in the riotous procession of Bacchus and Silenus.

7) The month of March, when the trees come back to life after winter, is called March because it is named after Mars in his capacity as Mars Silvanus. It is the only month of the year that is named after one of the planets. Interestingly, the only Narnian month ever named in the Chronicles is ?Greenroof?, during which all the events of Prince Caspian take place. In ancient Rome, the festival of Mars (the Feriae Marti) began on the first day of March and Bacchanalian festivities followed on the sixteenth and seventeenth, just after the Ides of March (the fifteenth) on which, famously, Julius Caesar was assassinated by being stabbed by his own disloyal Romans. Given the Bacchanalian revelry recorded in this story (in chapters 11 and 14), and given the fact that Miraz is betrayed and stabbed in the back by one of his own men, the connections with Mars grow ever more evident. There are many more reasons why Prince Caspian is a Martial story, and I explain some of these things in my book, Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C.S. Lewis

Go here for the introduction to this interview.

In Planet Narnia, you discuss how following the Copernican revolution astrology and astronomy became separated. It appears that a naturalistic worldview dismissed the "non-scientific" understanding of the planets. You also note that "even where astrology is explicit in Lewis's work, it has received surprisingly little attention" (245) from Lewis scholars. Do you think this quick dismissal or avoidance of astrology among Christians today is related to the naturalism or materialism promoted by science?

I think that's one of the reasons, yes.  Christians who are too anxious to achieve scientific 'respectability' have bought into the naturalistic paradigm, - the idea that nature is just so much raw material to be chopped up and studied without reference to its connection with us, its fellow creatures, or its Creator.  Three other reasons spring to mind.  

1.  An unbalanced notion of human 'dominion' over nature, - where dominion is mistakenly glossed as 'domination'

2.  An excessive focus upon the distinction between 'nature' and 'grace'.  Lewis criticised this in Karl Barth.  Lewis preferred Richard Hooker's line of thinking, in which 'nature hath need of grace' but, also, 'grace hath use of nature'.  In an incarnational religion, such as Christianity, one can't draw a hard and fast line between matter and spirit.  Christ has honoured human nature by taking it upon himself, and by being resurrected in bodily form.

3.  An unbalanced reading of scripture, focusing only upon the condemnations of astrology, and not recalling that there is a much more positive view of star-lore in the Bible as well: e.g. Judges 5:20, Job 38:31, Psalm 19:1-3; Matthew 2:1-10; 24:29, etc.

You say of C.S. Lewis that, "He was not prepared to write off a view of the cosmos, as his schoolmasters had written off paganism, simply because it had been shown to be factually inadequate; ideas could be entertained for their beauty, not just their truth." (29) This seems to suggest that something can be beautiful without being connected to truth. How can something false be beautiful?

Let us distinguish two kinds of falseness.  There is a bad falseness, the falseness of a lie, but there is also a good falseness, the 'falseness' of a story.  Both can be beautiful.  

The former kind of falseness is dangerous because of its beauty, its power to attract.  It's because temptations to sin can be attractive that they are hard to resist.  The devil can appear 'as an angel of light'.  Lewis pointed out how the idea of 'the beautiful but evil fay' has all but disappeared from the modern imagination, which is one of the reasons why the beauty of Jadis in 'The Magician's Nephew' is so emphasized.  She is evil, merciless, false, but she is beautiful.

But there is a second kind of falseness, which is better called not falseness, but fiction or metaphorical thinking.  When Jesus told parables he was not relating historical events; rather, he was using his imagination (his power of thinking metaphorically) in a good way.  We don't need to believe that he had a particular fatted calf in mind when he told the story of the prodigal son.  Parables, though 'false' as histories of particular events, are still true and good and - yes, beautiful - as stories.

It's in this sense that Lewis approached scientific models of the cosmos.  Models of the cosmos are products of the human imagination.  (Imagination, Lewis thought, was essential to rational thought.)  They come and they go.  Once upon a time people believed in the Ptolemaic story of cosmological arrangements.  Then they believed in the Newtonian story.  Then in the Einsteinian.  None of these models is the sum total of truth about the universe.  Each gets in a certain number of facts and leaves out others.  In that sense, none is fully true, but each is useful (some much more useful than others), and all possess degrees of beauty.  Lewis thought the Ptolemaic model especially beautiful because of its orderliness, its comprehensiveness, its perfectly graded hierarchy in which great and small are equally at home.  For more on why he thought this, read his book, 'The Discarded Image'.  

Lewis said that, "the characters of the planets, as conceived by medieval astrology, seem to me to have a permanent value as spiritual symbols?to provide a Phanomenologie de Geistes which is specially worth while in our own generation." Is that medieval phenomenology still relevant for today's postmodern generations?

It's important to quote the next sentence.  Having said that the planets are especially worth while in his own generation, Lewis goes on to say: 'Of Saturn we know more than enough, but who does not need to be reminded of Jove?'  He says this because he thought his own generation had been 'born under Saturn' (so to speak).  Saturn was the planet of calamity and death and disaster.  Lewis thought that his own generation had been born under Saturn because his own generation was that generation which was doomed to grow up (and in many cases, not grow up) during the First World War.  Lewis had been a teenage officer in that conflict and was severely wounded in the Battle of Arras in 1918.  He described much of the poetry of the 1920s and 1930s as 'Saturnocentric', - fixated upon Saturn and associated pessimism, cynicism, and despair.  That was a natural and understandable response to the tragedy which was the Great War, but Lewis thought that the Saturnine shadow cast over his own generation was a historical accident and not an eternal truth about the universe.  He thought that Jupiter (Jove) was a much better representation of the heart of spiritual reality, because Jovial qualities (kingliness, magnanimity, sacrifice, festivity) were a good way of symbolising the Christian God. 

In today's postmodern generation, we have not the same cause for being Saturnocentric, though there is still plenty of cynicism and despair around.  Perhaps our current generation is more likely to be fixated with Venus (sexuality) or with Luna (doubt), than Saturn.   

Whichever planet currently 'dominates', Jupiter remains a valuable summary of spiritual qualities, - qualities which are eternally relevant, Lewis would argue, because they convey important aspects of the divine nature.   

In Spenser's Images of Life, Lewis coined the term "donegality." You've adopted this term to help you describe the planetary themes you found in the Chronicles of Narnia. For those not familiar with the word, what does it mean, and how is it helpful for this study?

Lewis thought that many places, like many books, had an indefinable quality, - hard to put into words, but unmistakable.  London has its peculiar 'Londonness' and Donegal (in Ireland) has its 'Donegality'.  In 'Planet Narnia' I take this word, 'donegality', and apply it to Lewis's technique of conveying atmosphere in the seven Narnia Chronicles.  I believe that what Lewis was attempting the Chronicles was a new thing in imaginative literature, and that 'donegality' is a helpful term because it encapsulates this new thing.  By donegality I mean to denote the spiritual essence or quiddity of the Narnia Chronicles as intended by Lewis and inhabited unconsciously by the reader. The donegality of a story is its peculiar atmosphere or quality; its pervasive and purposed integral tone or flavour; its tacit spirit, a spirit that the author consciously sought to conjure, but which was designed to remain implicit in the matter of the text, despite being also concentrated and consummated in a Christologically representative character, the more influentially to inform the work and so affect the reader.

Isn't astrology incompatible with Christianity?

It depends what you mean by 'astrology'.  If you mean 'worshipping the planets' or 'regarding the planetary influences as determinative', then, yes, astrology is unChristian.  But 'astrology' doesn't necessarily mean either of those things.  Literally, astrology means 'study of the stars', and there is nothing dangerous, wrong, or foolish about studying God's creation. 

Although the Bible outlaws worship of the 'host of heaven' (see for example, Deuteronomy 4:19; 2 Kings 17:16; Job 31:26f; Jeremiah 8:2), the Bible also allows that the stars have spiritual significance, which is to be respected, studied, and, indeed, acted upon.  The stars proclaim the glory of God, according to the nineteenth psalm (Lewis's favourite), a psalm which St Paul quotes (Romans 10:18) in order to demonstrate how the Gentiles have already heard the preaching of Christ.  The Magi who followed the Star of Bethlehem to the birthplace of Christ clearly understood this (Matthew 2:2, 9-10).

Throughout the Bible the stars are seen as 'signs' (Genesis 1:14; Jeremiah 10:2; Matthew 24:29). Interpretation of these signs is depicted negatively in Isaiah (47:13) and Daniel (1:20; 2:27; 4:7), but only because it was practised by heathens for godless ends, not because such astrological enquiry was considered evil or dangerous per se. Go here for more on this question and other common questions that have been asked about the book.

The following is a transcript I typed from clips of an interview Rick Warren recently participated in. In summary, Warren claims that prayer and preaching do not produce spiritual maturity or grow churches. Instead, it takes ?skill.? And ?skill? apparently means being a good salesman. The interviewer asked Warren if he had read the Reveal Study and what he thought of it:

Of course I?ve read the Reveal Study. The biggest mistake that the church has made is we think sermons will produce spiritual maturity? They will not. Bill Hybels is one of the greatest preachers in history? They forget 95% of what they hear within 72 hours. Well if you?re forgetting 95% of everything you?ve heard in your lifetime, that is not going to produce spiritual maturity... Jesus had a process by which he took people from no faith in Christ to be disciples? First public words of Jesus, what he says to his disciples, is he says, ?Come and see?? Now that?s the entry point for faith? ?Come and see.? What?s the commitment level of ?Come and see?? Nothing. Just show up? Sit in the back- don?t sing anything, say anything, sacrifice anything. Jesus never left them there and? from ?Come and see? he took them through consistent steps, and all through the three and a half years of ministry he?s turning up the heat. And as they begin to follow him, he starts saying, ?Now, you?re my disciple if,? and he redefines commitment. ?You?re my disciple if you love one another.? Right before the cross he turns around to them and he says, ?If you?re going to follow me, you gotta take up your cross, deny yourself, and follow me.? Now, would you agree that there?s a huge difference in commitment between ?come and see? and ?come and die??...

We can?t give pat answers anymore. People say, ?Well if you just pray and love people and preach the word, your church will grow.?? That?s just not true? Somebody needs to stand up. I know a lot of guys who pray more than I do and their church is dying. It takes more than prayer to grow a church. Ecclesiastes 10:10 says if the ax is dull and its edge is unsharpened, more strength is needed. But skill will give success. Skill. It doesn?t say dedication will give success. It doesn?t say sincerity will give success. It doesn?t say preaching the word and loving people will give success. It says skill? You know if you go out fishing, sometimes in the middle of the day you have to change bait. Because what the fish were biting on in the mornings they?re not biting on in the afternoon or evening. And what we?re doing in a lot of churches we?re using baits and hooks from the 50?s, 60?s, 70?s and 80?s and it?s the 21st century.

The ellipses (?) represent breaks in the audio, as I typed this transcript based on Way of the Master?s cutting of the interview. If anyone has access to the original audio or video, please pass it along. It?s entirely possible that we?re missing some things Warren said here, but I?m not sure there?s much Warren could say to make this sound better (or biblical).

In addition to the criticisms cut into the interview, Fide-o has posted some thoughtful responses, and there?s not much I would add..