CHAPTER TWELVE

The Telescope

For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face.[1]

1 Corinthians 13:12

C. S. Lewis had a telescope on the balcony of his bedroom and liked visiting the local observatory in Oxford where he lived. He often pointed out unusual conjunctions of the planets to his friends or wrote letters to people mentioning what he had recently been observing in the sky.

For instance, he once wrote to his godson, Laurence Harwood (the godson to whom he sent coded messages), and asked him, “Do you ever notice Venus these mornings at about quarter past seven? She has been terrifically bright lately, almost better than Jupiter.”[2]

But it is one thing to observe the planets; it is another thing to see them as divine messengers—to hear them “telling the glory of God” (Psalm 19:1).

How can we see them in that way or hear their silent music?

Here is where we come back to the discovery of Neptune by the astronomer John Couch Adams. (His middle name is pronounced “Cooch,” by the way.) He was sitting in his Cambridge observatory one day, thinking. And what he was thinking about was the planet Uranus. He was wondering why Uranus orbited the Sun the way it did. The orbit wasn’t quite as he would have expected. There was a kink in it.

Adams realized that there must be another planet beyond Uranus, exerting a gravitational pull on it and pulling it slightly out of a smooth orbit around the Sun. And the amazing thing is that Adams correctly worked out not only the existence of Neptune but also its position before he ever saw it!

Neptune floats in the sky about two and a half billion miles above the Earth. And yet John Couch Adams knew it was there even without observing it. How did he know this? By correctly using reason, logic, and mathematics.

Lewis thought that this was an astounding achievement and wrote about it in his book Miracles. He saw it as evidence that the universe is filled with the spirit of reason. Our minds, working properly, can plug into this spirit of reason and work out all sorts of mysteries, even in the remotest corners of the universe.

But imagine if you’d been sitting in the observatory next to John Couch Adams while he had been thinking those great thoughts. You would have looked at him and seen just an ordinary man with an ordinary-sized head. Yet inside that head the gigantic planet of Neptune, billions of miles away, was making itself known.

If a brain scanner had existed back then, it could have recorded certain electrical impulses as Adams’s brain worked away. But from the inside, from Adams’s point of view, the electrical impulses would not have been electrical impulses; they would have been ideas flooded with meaning, with mighty wonders of the night sky.

Which viewpoint is more valuable? The outside one, which sees little movements of grey matter, or the inside one, which perceives a whole new heavenly body? Lewis would have said that Adams’s viewpoint was more valuable. Adams was inside the experience, looking along the beam of reason. And what Adams achieved by standing within the light of reason is a good picture of what a Christian does when he or she stands within the light of faith.

Once your mind is plugged into the Holy Spirit of God, you can begin to see that the heavens declare His glory. And how can you get plugged into God’s Spirit? In order to know God, what do you have to do?

Adams plugged himself into the spirit of reason by working hard, thinking clearly, and reading widely. He made himself into a good astronomer. To know God, must we also do the right things and live cleanly and be good people? Yes and no.

On the one hand, no. Lewis puts it like this:

When you come to knowing God, the initiative lies on His side. If He does not show Himself, nothing you can do will enable you to find Him. And, in fact, He shows much more of Himself to some people than to others—not because He has favourites, but because it is impossible for Him to show Himself to a man whose whole mind and character are in the wrong condition. Just as sunlight, though it has no favourites, cannot be reflected in a dusty mirror as clearly as in a clean one.[3]

Nothing we can do will enable us to find God if God doesn’t want us to find Him. Caspian in The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader” has to realize that he can’t get to Aslan’s country unless and until Aslan chooses to call him there. To put this in theological language, we would say that it is only by God’s grace that we can be saved—only because God freely draws us to Himself through the sacrificial death of Christ are we able to come to Him. He calls us because He loves us, not because we merit the call.

But on the other hand, yes, we do need to work hard and try to be good and true and beautiful people. Why? Because God wants us to be people like that: the more we are like that, the more we will be able to respond to His love. Aslan was calling Caspian, but via his life in Narnia. Aslan wanted Caspian to live his life in Narnia in a way that would prepare him for Aslan’s country later. Caspian’s whole life—his well-lived life—was the route he had to travel in order to arrive in Aslan’s country at the end of The Silver Chair.

In other words, Aslan wanted Caspian to be perfect—to clean the dust off his mirror, to remove the smudges from his telescope—not because these things would earn Caspian the right to enter Aslan’s country, but because they were part of what Caspian, as someone destined for Aslan’s country, would naturally want and need to do.

Lewis puts it like this:

While in other sciences the instruments you use are things external to yourself (things like microscopes and telescopes), the instrument through which you see God is your whole self. And if a man’s self is not kept clean and bright, his glimpse of God will be blurred—like the Moon seen through a dirty telescope.[4]

The only problem is this: we can’t keep ourselves clean and bright! We keep getting our telescopes dirty. That’s why we need other people to help us—other Christians who will guide us and encourage us and rebuke us. We need to pray together and read the Bible together and eat the Lord’s Supper together.

Lewis writes:

The one really adequate instrument for learning about God is the whole Christian community, waiting for Him together. Christian brotherhood is, so to speak, the technical equipment for this science—the laboratory outfit. That is why all these people who turn up every few years with some patent simplified religion of their own as a substitute for the Christian tradition are really wasting time. Like a man who has no instrument but an old pair of field glasses setting out to put all the real astronomers right. He may be a clever chap—he may be cleverer than some of the real astronomers, but he is not giving himself a chance. And two years later everyone has forgotten all about him, but the real science is still going on.[5]

It is humiliating to realize that we need other people; we would like to be self-sufficient. It is humiliating to realize that we can’t find God unless God wants to be found; we would prefer it if He would be at our beck and call. But these humiliations are necessary if we are to make any progress at all.

The Narnia Code

Let me finish this book by telling you a little bit more about how I discovered the Narnia code. It is worth recounting because it illustrates our need for other people and our need for an act of revelation in the life of faith. I have already told you of the eureka moment when I was reading “The Planets” in bed, but now I need to tell you what happened earlier that week and earlier that day.

Earlier that week, a friend of mine, Christopher Holmwood, gave me the soundtrack to the Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. I listened to it several times in just a few days, and although I didn’t like every track, I thought some numbers interpreted parts of the story extremely well. In any event, the recording caused me to immerse myself in Lewis’s story as told through music. If you like, I was beginning to listen to its heart, to tune into its spirit. I was hearing Lewis’s story, but hearing it without words.

A few days later I had a meeting in Cambridge with the Right Reverend Simon Barrington-Ward, the former Bishop of Coventry. Bishop Simon knew Lewis well in the 1950s. Long before he became a bishop, he worked as chaplain of Magdalene College, Cambridge, during the time when Lewis was there as professor of medieval and Renaissance literature. The two men used to go walking together and spoke with one another at quite a close, personal level despite the difference in their ages.

After Lewis resigned his position because of ill health, he wrote to the master of Magdalene College, jokingly saying that he would haunt the college buildings and grounds, but only because he loved the place so much. And he made a particular reference to his young friend, the college chaplain, saying, “If in some twilit hour anyone sees a bald and bulky spectre in the Combination Room or the garden, don’t get Simon to exorcise it, for it is a harmless wraith and means nothing but good.”[6]

In my meeting with Bishop Simon on this occasion, I asked him to help me understand what Lewis meant by “wordless prayer,” a subject Lewis talks about quite a bit in his book on prayer, Letters to Malcolm. I wasn’t sure what wordless prayer was, and I couldn’t understand why Lewis, who was so gifted with words, would want (or need) to pray without them.

In order to help me understand this point, Bishop Simon opened up a book called The Monk of Mount Athos and read aloud a passage describing a meeting between two monks, an old monk and a young monk.

The old monk was wise and eloquent, full of his own intelligence. But he suddenly found that he had nothing to say when the younger monk, in all simplicity, asked him, “How do the perfect speak?” The older monk realized he didn’t know the first thing about perfect speech. But his inability to speak allowed him to hear, and into his humbled silence the young monk planted the message that “The perfect never say anything of themselves. . . . They only say what the Spirit suffers them to say.”[7]

The point that the younger monk was making was basically the same point Paul makes in his letter to the Romans where he explains how the Holy Spirit “intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words” (Romans 8:26). When the Holy Spirit truly breathes through human prayers, words aren’t always needed.

As Simon read this passage aloud, it made an extraordinarily deep impact on me. There was a momentous charge in the words, and the atmosphere in the room suddenly became intense and rich.

After this most unusual experience, I returned to my theological college, Ridley Hall, in a kind of daze. I did not know exactly what had happened to me, but I felt certain it was somehow tremendously important.

Before going to sleep that night, I lay in bed reading Lewis’s chapter on “The Heavens” in The Discarded Image. The thought occurred to me that it would be useful to compare Lewis’s academic understanding of the heavens with his poetic treatment of the same thing.

That was when I pulled out my copy of his collected poems and began reading “The Planets.” The phrase “winter passed / And guilt forgiven”[8] sprang from the page, demanding my attention. I had come across the passing of winter and the forgiving of guilt elsewhere in Lewis’s writings: those things formed the centerpiece of his first Narnia tale. Could there be a link somehow between the poem and Chronicle? That thought was the stray spark connecting Jupiter to The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe in my mind, and one by one the other planet-to-book relationships began to follow.

As the whole pattern began to come clear and make sense, I remembered my conversation with Simon Barrington-Ward. The young monk had talked about the Holy Spirit speaking through human prayers. Here in Lewis’s fiction was an imaginative version of a similar sort of thing: spiritual symbols speaking through stories.

I immediately knew, though it took much longer to understand fully and reliably, that Lewis had cryptically designed the Chronicles so that the seven heavens spoke through them like a kind of language or song. He had translated the planets into plots, and the music of the spheres could be heard silently sounding (or tingling, as he would have said) in each tale.

The Narnia series, I now started to see, was a literary equivalent of Holst’s Planets Suite; each one of the seven heavens gave the key to a different Chronicle.

When as a child I made my silhouette pictures of a lion, a witch, and a wardrobe, I had typed “cslewiscslewiscslewis” back and forth across each image. What I really should have typed was “jupiterjupiterjupiter.” That was the signature tune sounding throughout the whole work. I had never literally heard it, and yet I had heard it every time I read the book.

The End

The Narnia code, as I’ve called it, was a brilliant idea of Lewis’s, and discovering it helps explain all sorts of fascinating and beautiful things about the seven stories. But I think Lewis would want us to concentrate not on him and his Chronicles, but on God and His creation.

Lewis described Psalm 19 as the greatest poem in the book of Psalms and one of the greatest lyrics in the entire world. The apostle Paul quotes Psalm 19 and says that what the heavens speak is “the word of Christ” (Romans 10:17-18, NIV). So let us finish with the opening verses of that psalm:

The heavens are telling the glory of God;

and the firmament proclaims his handiwork.

Day to day pours forth speech,

and night to night declares knowledge.

There is no speech, nor are there words;

their voice is not heard;

yet their voice goes out through all the earth,

and their words to the end of the world. Psalm 19:1-4