In the opening sections of C.S. Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, there are several comments Lewis cleverly inserts with regard to the limits of human logic and its impact on faith. The simplest example is through the fact that Lewis has Lucy, the youngest of the three Pevensy children and the one with the most child-like imagination, as the one who not only first stumbles into Narnia, but also the one who introduces her siblings to Narnia.
Another example is when the professor invites Susan and Peter (the two oldest Pevensy children) to his study to help them deal with the inter-familial conflict Lucy has created by suggesting the very real existence of this make-believe land called “Narnia”. The professor sits behind his desk in his heavy house robe and his low-hanging reading glasses with disheveled white hair as he packs his pipe while making enquiries about the situation.
“She seems to think she’s found a magical land in the upstairs wardrobe,” Susan explained.
With a startling excitement the professor responded, “What was it like!?”
“It was like talking to a lunatic,” Peter answered.
“No, no, the magical land?,” the professor clarified.
“You’re not saying that you believe her?”
“You don’t?”
“I mean logically it’s impossible!,” answered Susan.
Frustrated by the children’s lack of belief, the professor audibly reflects, “What do they teach in school these days?”
There are a number of other places that push the same point throughout the book. We tend to miss Lewis’ lesson on the point because we share the same worldview as the older Pevensy children, relatively speaking (which is a modernist perspective which is characterized by ontology being verifiable through logic or empirical evidence). The simple fact that the Pevensy children only come to believe in Lucy’s claims when they themselves accidentally, and quite literally, stumble into Narnia when hiding in the wardrobe from the wrath of the housekeeper.
So what is Lewis’ lesson on the correspondence between logic and faith? While the lesson is certainly multi-faceted, I believe the central point of the lesson is quite simple actually – faith is faith. It is not faith if it can first be verified. Faith takes us outside of ourselves – faith takes us beyond the tiny realm of our own human experiences and certainties, which is something we need.
There is something more than this about Lewis’ point, however, that touches me. It is a balm to be reminded that we serve a transcendent God; that the reality that he offers through unbroken communion with the Holy Trinity is beyond anything that we can even begin to comprehend. The confines of the human mind are just that – boundaries. To hear Lewis say to us through his gracious story telling, “You don’t have to get it, just believe it” dismantles the worldview that weighs heavily upon the western world. “Getting it,” “understanding it,” “wrapping our minds around it,” is not required! In fact, God never intended for us to fully understand it. If we could fully understand it, what kind of God would He be?
Jehovah’s Witnesses reject the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity because they claim it is just not “reasonable.” My response to this is that if everything about faith were reasonable, then it wouldn’t be faith at all now would it?
This is not an appeal for the neglect of logic or the intellect, please don’t get me wrong. As one who is in pursuit of a PhD in exploring and understanding the technicalities of syntactic function in classical Hebrew poetry, I’m the first to champion the beauty, benefit and necessity of the mind and intellectual pursuit. However, human comprehension must not be the line of demarcation for embrace of a reality. Existence does not depend on systematic comprehension. It just can’t.
Lewis helps me (and I would hope others) be free from this powerful lie of western culture.
Oh, and by the way, this is the message of both Ecclesiastes and Job – the beginning of wisdom is recognizing the boundaries God has placed on the human mind.