Episode Details

Christian creators often say things like, “C. S. Lewis didn’t create his fiction to teach Christian truth. Instead he only used his imagination.” But is this what Lewis actually wrote? And is this how Christians ought to create stories today?

Stranger Than Fantastical Fiction

• Life-sized Gundam in Yokohama is now in testing mode
• This Life-size Gundam Robot Built in Yokohoma, Japan is Terrifying
• From 2015: Gundam Global Challenge Winners Determined To Make A Full Size Gundam Walk
• Gundam Factory website

Concession stand

• This theme isn’t responding to anyone in particular. It’s more of a meme.
• This doesn’t enable the pragmatic, dull, shallow “creativity” we do critique.
• Also, this isn’t all about authors. We’re all created to be creative for God’s glory.

Lewis’s essay: ‘Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What’s To Be Said’

• We’re exploring Lewis’s essay.
• You can likely find it copied to the internet with a unique phrase like “pure moonshine.”
• Our copy comes from a paperback called Of Other Worlds: Essays and Short Stories.

Here’s the main quote as we often read or hear it:

Some people seem to think that I began by asking myself how I could say something about Christianity to children; then fixed on the fairy tale as an instrument; then collected information about child-psychology and decided what age-group I’d write for; drew up a list of basic Christian truths and hammered out ‘allegories’ to embody them. This is all pure moonshine. I couldn’t write in that way at all. Everything began with images; a faun carrying an umbrella, a queen on a sledge, a magnificent lion. At first there wasn’t even anything Christian about them; that element pushed itself in of its own accord.

Lewis does quietly rebuke the notion of committees making or using stories as mere “teaching tools.” But he also doesn’t accept an idea of “creative freedom” for its own sake. He doesn’t believe in simply “The Author” enjoying images, but also “The Form” and “The Man.”

1. ‘The Author’

• Lewis dismisses “the renaissance ideas of ‘pleasing’ and ‘instructing.'”
• He isn’t addressing the entertainment/teaching dichotomy. Instead he says:

All I want to use is the distinction between the author as author and the author as man, citizen, or Christian. What this comes to for me is that there are usually two reasons for writing an imaginative work, which may be called Author’s reason and the Man’s. If only one of these is present, then, so far as I am concerned, the book will not be written. If the first is lacking, it can’t; if the second is lacking, it shouldn’t.

• Lewis talks about the author: the inspiration, images, imagination.
• He speaks of “the bubbling,” the disorganized array of ideas and pictures.
• Only then does he give the example of his own initial Narnian images.
• But we cannot stop there! Story-making doesn’t end with the images alone.
• Then “the form” organizes the images and “the man” gives them purpose.

2. ‘The Form’

• Lewis says of the initial outpouring of images and ideas:

This ferment leads to nothing unless it is accompanied with a longing for a Form: verse or prose, short story, novel, play, or what not. When