Near the end of The Last Battle, Digory mutters under his breath, “It’s all in Plato, all in Plato” (LB, Chapter 15, p. 759). What does he mean? Is Lewis saying that The Chronicles of Narnia are a simply a retelling of something to be found in Plato? If so, what is the story in Plato that is retold in the Narnia tales? Or is he suggesting that the key to understanding the Chronicles is to be found in Plato? If so, what is the key in Plato, and how does it unlock the meaning of the Narnia stories?
Digory and Socrates
Readers of the complete Narnia tales will know that the Lord Digory of The Last Battle, who says “It’s all in Plato,” is actually the Professor in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Could it be that the Professor teaches his students Plato? Perhaps. We have no way of knowing. But here is a more intriguing question: Is Digory meant to be a figure out of one of Plato’s dialogues? Some readers have thought so. Indeed, some have thought that the Professor of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe is meant to be a Socrates figure. But how could that be? Here is a suggestion. Socrates in the dialogues of Plato, especially in the early ones, tends to ask questions rather than give answers. In fact, he is especially good at asking questions and refuses to answer those questions himself. His questions make the people he is questioning reflect on something puzzling that they hadn’t puzzled about before. In some cases they come up with answers they didn’t know they would be able to give. And they come up with these answers, not by looking in a book, but by just thinking about the questions Socrates poses. This method of questioning has come to be called the “Socratic method.”
Many teachers today use the Socratic method. It’s a way of encouraging students to figure out things for themselves, rather than simply accept, on the authority of the teacher, the answers that the teacher gives.
Plato’s greatest work, the Republic, is taken up with the question of what justice is, both justice in a state and justice in a single individual. In Book 1 of that dialogue Socrates uses his characteristic question-and-answer method to see if his conversation partners can figure out for themselves what justice is. Cephalus, an old “no-nonsense” sort of person, says that justice is simply telling the truth and paying your debts. That’s all there is to it, he says.
Socrates encourages Cephalus to think the suggestion through. He does this by asking another question: “Would it be just to return a weapon to someone who has, in the meantime, gone mad?” Everyone who thinks about Socrates’s question soon realizes that, despite its initial attractiveness, Cephalus’s proposal cannot be accepted. It wouldn’t be just to return a weapon to an owner who had gone mad. And so, whatever justice or fairness is, it is not simply telling the truth and paying your debts.
Is what the Professor does in The Lion, the Witch, and Wardrobe similar to what Socrates does in this exchange with Cephalus in the Republic? Up to a point. But let’s think about the comparison a little more.
Edmund, who had been with Lucy in Narnia, decides when he gets back to tell Susan and Peter that he and Lucy had only been pretending when they said they had visited another world. He tells them that Lucy’s story about Narnia was, in fact, all nonsense. When Edmund says this, Lucy, of course, is simply devastated. Peter and Susan, who have always found Lucy to be trustworthy, don’t know what to think. So they decide to ask the Professor for help.
What the Professor does is to ask Peter and Susan questions. He begins by asking them how they know that their sister’s story isn’t true. When Susan says that it is Edmund’s report that has convinced them, the Professor asks them whether their experience with Lucy in the past had led them to believe in Lucy. They agree that it had. But they were afraid that she might have gone mad. The Professor then assures them that one can tell by looking at Lucy that she is not mad.
Peter then offers other reasons for doubting Lucy’s story. The last and strongest reason is that, although Lucy reported being in this other world for hours, she had returned from the wardrobe in less than a minute. To him this difference between the time Lucy reported being in Narnia and the time she had been missing from our world is enough to make her story incredible.
The Professor replies that if there really were such a place as Lucy describes, then it would likely have a separate time of its own. He adds: “However long you stayed there it would never take up any of our time” (LWW, Chapter 5, p. 132). Moreover, he continues, a girl of Lucy’s age would be unlikely to make up the idea that there is another world with a time of its own, a time not even correlated with our time.
There is, indeed, something Socratic about what the Professor does in this incident. What he does is, we could say, a little Socratic, but not entirely so. One thing that makes it a little Socratic is that the Professor wants the children to think the issue through for themselves, just as Socrates wants those around him to think for themselves about what justice is. In another of Plato’s dialogues, Socrates asks his conversation partners what courage is. In a third, he asks what temperance is. Socrates is always interested in figuring out, through questioning other people, what some virtue is.
The Professor has a different sort of aim. He wants to help Susan and Peter figure out whom they should believe: Edmund or Lucy. Determining whether someone is trustworthy who claims to have witnessed something very important, say, a traffic accident, or a murder, is difficult to do. Police have to learn how to do this. And trial lawyers have to be good at convincing the members of a jury that one witness is lying and another is telling the truth. But helping people figure out which witnesses are reliable is rather different from helping people think about what justice or bravery is.
In some of Plato’s dialogues, Socrates suggests that we all know what justice and bravery are, but we may need someone to ask us questions so that we can come to say what we already know. By contrast, the Professor has certain maxims for weighing evidence, principles that he hopes Edmund and Susan, if they think about them, will also accept. Here is one:
Maxim 1: If we think two people, A and B, have both witnessed roughly the same thing but report having seen very different things, we should believe the one whose reports have been more reliable in the past.
This maxim seems to be a good one. If you and I think about it, we might well come to accept it as well. But consider this maxim, which the Professor also puts forward:
Maxim 2: If someone reports having visited another reality altogether, we should tend to believe the reporter, if, according to the report, the time in that other reality does not match up with the time in our reality.
This maxim is certainly an interesting one. But we might have reasons for doubting it. We might, for example, be skeptical about whether there is such a thing as another reality. If we don’t think there is such a thing, then we won’t think it’s important to determine whether somebody has ever been there. Moreover, we might reason that a memory of having had an extraordinary experience that cannot be coordinated with the time in our ordinary experience must be more like dreaming than taking a real trip to another world. I can, for example, fall asleep for a very short time and yet, while asleep, have a dream of having done something that took a very long time. But then I don’t suppose that the trip I dreamed about was real.
The Professor clearly expects that Susan and Edmund, when they think about the matter, will come to accept his maxims and to disbelieve Edmund. In a somewhat similar way, Socrates, in the Republic, expects that Cephalus and the others, when they think about the matter, will come to reject Cephalus’s suggestion that justice is telling the truth and paying your debts.
Still, the question Socrates asks (“What is justice?”) is a very different kind of question from the one the Professor asks (“Should we believe Lucy or Edmund?”). The Professor is discussing grounds for believing someone who claims to have had a very unusual experience. Socrates is discussing the nature of justice. Any thoughtful person should have some idea of what justice is. But very few of us have any idea of how to determine whether someone who claims to have visited another world is telling the truth. So, the Professor is only partly a Socrates figure.
The Allegory of Underworld
There is, however, something more like Plato in The Silver Chair, where we find an image quite like one in Plato’s Republic, the famous Allegory of the Cave.1 In presenting it, Socrates tells a story about prisoners being chained to their places in a cave, where the only things they can see are shadows of objects cast on the cave wall by the light of a fire inside the cave. The prisoners, unable to see the objects themselves, take the shadows to be their reality.
A prisoner who gets unchained may be able to leave the cave altogether and emerge to see real objects lighted by the real sun. Anyone who has seen real objects outside the cave, according to Socrates, will not want to return to the cave. But it will be the released prisoner’s obligation to return to the cave and enlighten the prisoners so that they, too, will want to be unchained.
In The Silver Chair, Jill Pole, Eustace Scrubb, and Puddleglum the Marsh-wiggle find their way into “Underworld,” a realm of its own, without a real sun—a world that lies under “the Overworld” of Narnia. There are many parallels between Underworld and the Cave that Socrates describes in the Republic.
The basic idea Plato wants to put across with his Allegory of the Cave is the contrast between appearance and reality. Plato thinks of the physical world we experience through our senses as an image or shadow of the real world of eternal and unchangeable realities—the Good itself, Beauty, Justice, Wisdom, and other such timeless essences, or “Forms.” Insofar as you or I might be good or wise, it is, Plato insists, only by “partaking in,” or imitating, the Form of Goodness and the Form of Wisdom that we are good or wise.
The Allegory of the Cave is meant to make vivid Plato’s idea that many of us (perhaps most of us) live our lives in the world of mere appearances or illusions. Most of us, most of the time, passively accept what we’re told by our parents, teachers, politicians, and the media.
According to Plato’s Allegory, we may be released from our cave of ignorance by philosophy and led by reason outside the cave to view true realities lighted by the real sun, which, for Plato, is the symbol of the highest reality, the Good itself. The objects that a philosophically enlightened person can see in the light of the Good are the Forms. Once we have been liberated from the cave and have seen true realities, we will not want to return to the cave, Socrates says. Nevertheless, it is our duty, he thinks, to return and help free the prisoners from their world of illusion.
The picture of Underworld we get in The Silver Chair is also a world dimly lit by its own inferior light of only partial comprehension. The chief prisoner of Underworld, Prince Rilian, is tied to a silver chair, much as Plato’s prisoners are chained in place. But he is also kept in the thrall of the Queen of Underworld by the thrumming sound of a musical instrument and by a sweet-smelling fume that dulls his mind.
When Prince Rilian is freed from his chair and is able to confront the Queen, she tries to re-enchant him and convince him that Narnia, the Overworld, is not real, but only imaginary. Jill tries to fight off the Queen’s efforts to enchant her:
Jill couldn’t remember the names of the things in our world. And this time it didn’t come into her head that she was being enchanted, for now the magic was in its full strength; and of course, the more enchanted you get, the more certain you feel that you are not enchanted at all.
She found herself saying (and at the moment it was a relief to say): “No. I suppose that other world must be all a dream.”
“Yes, it is all a dream,” said the Witch, always thrumming. (SC, Chapter 12, p. 630)
The enchantment idea is Lewis’s addition to Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. Yet it is fully in the spirit of Plato. And it is surprisingly appropriate to our experience today. I remember attending a meeting in which the proceedings were picked up by a closed-circuit television camera and displayed on monitors positioned around the room. To my astonishment, the participants in that meeting kept turning to the monitors to see themselves and others at the meeting, rather than looking directly at the people who were talking. They were so enchanted with the images of the meeting that they found those images more worth attending to than the speakers themselves.
Lewis embellishes Plato’s Allegory in another way. In one passage, the Queen of Underworld tries to undermine her visitors’ belief in Aslan and Narnia by convincing them that they are merely projections of their own imaginations:
The Witch shook her head. “I see,” she said, “that we should do no better with your lion, as you call it, than we did with your sun. You have seen lamps, and so you imagined a bigger and better lamp and called it the sun. You’ve seen cats, and now you want a bigger and better cat, and it’s to be called a lion. Well, ‘tis a pretty make-believe, though, to say truth, it would suit you all better if you were younger. And look how you can put nothing into your make-believe without copying it from the real world, this world of mine, which is the only world. But even you children are too old for such play.” (SC, Chapter 12, p. 632)
The Queen here is playing Aristotle to Lewis’s Plato. Aristotle criticized Plato for, as he supposed, simply making up a distinct thing, the Form of Beauty, in addition to all the beautiful things in the world—beautiful flowers, beautiful pictures, beautiful sunsets, and so on. In a similar way, the Queen criticizes the Narnians for making a grand and utterly perfect form of Underworld (namely, Narnia) and for making up Aslan as a large and perfect cat.
Later, we come to a fascinating further development in the story. Puddleglum claims that, even if he and his friends have made up Aslan and Narnia, still, this ideal world and this ideal being are better and, in the end, more important than what can be found in Underworld.
Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things—trees and grass and sun and moon and stars 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. Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one. And that’s a funny thing, when you come to think of it. We’re just babies making up a game, if you’re right. But four babies playing a game can make a play-world which licks your real world hollow. That’s why I’m going to stand by the play-world. (SC, Chapter 12, p. 633)
Not surprisingly, there is a line of thinking in Plato’s Republic that is similar to this speech of Puddleglum’s. Socrates says to his friend, Glaucon, “Suppose a painter had drawn an ideally beautiful figure complete to the last touch, would you think any the worse of him, if he could not show that a person as beautiful as that could exist?” Glaucon agrees that he would not. Socrates continues: “Well, we have been constructing in discourse the pattern of an ideal state. Is our theory any the worse, if he cannot prove it possible that a state so organized should be actually founded?”2 Glaucon agrees with Socrates that it would not be a worse picture, even if nothing completely like it could ever actually exist.
The Real Narnia
Plato, of course, thought the ideal state was real anyway, whether or not it could be actualized in the world we see around us. And here we come to the most Platonic aspect of the Narnia Chronicles. Near the end of The Last Battle, after Narnia has been destroyed, Peter, Edmund, and Lucy find themselves in a place where, as Edmund notes, the mountains seem very similar to those in Narnia. “They’re different,” Lucy says. “They have more colours on them and they look further away than I remembered and they’re more . . . more . . . oh, I don’t know . . . .” “More like the real thing,” adds Lord Digory. He explains:
You need not mourn over Narnia, Lucy. All of the old Narnia that mattered, all the dear creatures, have been drawn into the real Narnia through the Door. And of course it is different; as different as a real thing is from a shadow or as waking life is from a dream. . . .” His voice stirred everyone like a trumpet as he spoke these words: but when he added under his breath “It’s all in Plato, all in Plato: bless me what do they teach them at these schools?” the older ones laughed. It was so exactly like the sort of thing they had hear him say long ago in that other world where his beard was gray instead of golden. (LB, Chapter 15, p. 759)
In this ending to the Chronicles we have a picture of what we can call “Christian Platonism.” The idea of there being a realm of perfect things in which the things of our earthly life partake by resembling them is genuinely Platonic. It is the idea that our present life is really a hall of mirrors, or a “Shadowland,” as Lewis puts it in The Last Battle. The idea that we, or some of us anyway, may someday reach a world of perfection is certainly Christian. Yet it is also to be found in Plato, especially in the myths that Plato used to supplement the reasoning in his dialogues.
In one myth Plato tells us near the end of the dialogue Phaedo, we learn that people who have lived very holy lives will be “freed and released from the regions of the earth as from a prison.” They will make their way to “dwelling places it is difficult to describe clearly.”3 One reason for the difficulty in describing them seems to be their unqualified beauty.
After telling us this myth of an afterlife, Plato adds an important warning. It is a warning Lewis might well have been willing to append to the Chronicles:
No sensible man would insist that these things are [exactly] as I have described them, but I think it is fitting for a man to risk the belief—for the risk is a noble one—that this, or something like this, is true about our souls and their dwelling places, since the soul is evidently immortal, and a man should repeat this to himself as if it were an incantation, which is why I have been prolonging my tale.4
Admittedly, nothing quite like the Christ figure, Aslan, is to be found in Plato—not even in Plato’s myths. And Plato’s idea that philosophy offers the best route, perhaps the only route, to eternal bliss is not really Christian. So, there are important differences between Plato and Christian thought, even as that thought is reflected in the Narnia stories. Still, there are very important respects in which Lord Digory’s comment, “It’s all in Plato,” is quite correct. The Chronicles, like Plato’s own myths, do present a story version of Plato’s theory of reality.
In several respects Lewis develops further Plato’s idea of a “heaven of Forms” to which our souls, or some of them, may journey, as a kind of homecoming. Readers of Plato have sometimes taken the Forms to be abstract objects that individual objects in “our world” of coming to be and passing away have in common. But Plato also suggests that each Form is a perfect exemplar of itself. Thus, the Form of Beauty would be something perfectly beautiful, and the Form of Mountain would be itself a perfect mountain.
A famous difficulty with his theory that Plato himself points out (the difficulty is called the “Third Man Argument”) is this. If the Form, Beauty, is itself beautiful, then it seems there would be something the Form and all the beautiful things in this world—paintings, vases, sunsets, and so on—have in common, something that makes them all beautiful. This “something” would be another Form of Beauty over and above the first one. And, assuming that it, too, is beautiful, there would be still another, and so on indefinitely.
The Narnia tales seem to embrace such a succession in a strikingly Platonic vision of nested levels of being or reality. Thus, near the end of The Last Battle, Lucy says:
This is still Narnia, and more real and more beautiful than the Narnia down below, just as it was more real and more beautiful than the Narnia outside the Stable door! I see . . . world within world, Narnia within Narnia . . . .
“Yes,” said Mr Tumnus, “like an onion: except that as you go in and in, each circle is larger than the last.” (LB, Chapter 16, p. 765)
Lewis’s idea that there are worlds within worlds, instead of worlds over worlds, as Plato suggests, might make us think of Russian dolls—ever smaller dolls within ever smaller dolls. But Lewis saves us from thinking that this succession dwindles into insignificance by making each world bigger on the inside than it is on the outside.
There is another development of Plato’s ideas that should be appreciated. Plato seems to leave us with the idea that there will be nothing for our souls to do in heaven except eternally contemplate the Forms, including the Form of the Good, which Christian Platonists identify with God. But Lewis suggests that heaven is still a life of exploration and adventure. Even if we have explored one Narnia fully, there is always another one to explore. The “Great Story which no one on earth has read” is one which “goes on for ever: in which each chapter is better than the one before” (LB, Chapter 16, p. 767).
When, at the conclusion of the Narnia tales, Lucy expresses the fear that she and the others will be sent back to their former world, Aslan calms her fears. “The dream is ended,” he says; “this is the morning” (LB, Chapter 16, p. 767). Thus, in a fittingly Platonic reversal of the idea that paradise may be only a desperate dream of our own imagination, Aslan assures Lucy and the others that it was their earthly life that was the dream. What now awaits them is true reality.
1 Book 7, 514a–517c.
2 Republic, Book 5, 472d–e.
3 Phaedo, 114b.
4 Ibid., 114d.