November 16, 2005
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Images
Adam Gopnik on C. S. Lewis in this week’s New Yorker:“Lewis began with a number of haunted images….”“The best of the books are the ones… where the allegory is at a minimum and the images just flow.”
“‘Everything began with images,’ Lewis wrote….”
“We go to the writing of the marvellous, and to children’s books, for
stories, certainly, and for the epic possibilities of good and evil in
confrontation, not yet so mixed as they are in life. But we go, above
all, for imagery: it is the force of imagery that carries us forward.
We have a longing for inexplicable sublime imagery….”“The religious believer finds consolation, and relief, too, in the world
of magic exactly because it is at odds with the necessarily straitened
and punitive morality of organized worship, even if the believer is,
like Lewis, reluctant to admit it. The irrational images– the street
lamp in the snow and the silver chair and the speaking horse– are as
much an escape for the Christian imagination as for the rationalist,
and we sense a deeper joy in Lewis’s prose as it escapes from the
demands of Christian belief into the darker realm of magic. As for
faith, well, a handful of images is as good as an armful of arguments,
as the old apostles always knew.”Related material:
Click on pictures for details.
See also Windmills and
Verbum sat sapienti?
as well asat Calvin College
on Simone Weil,
Charles Williams,
Dante, and
“the way of images.”
