Jamin Bradley

(Some of the allegories thus imposed on my own books have been so ingenious and interesting that I often wish I had thought of them myself.)

C. S. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms (p. 116). Kindle Edition.

I’ll be traveling to Oxford, England, later this week, where I’ll be engaging the history of one of my heroes, C.S. Lewis. I’ll be visiting his house, gravesite, and checking out other places related to him and his good friend J.R.R. Tolkien. As I do this, I thought it’d be fun to write up some blog posts over the next few weeks about Lewis’s works, especially focused on his so-called “fictitious” world of Narnia. (What more would you expect from a guy with a map of Narnia as a tattoo sleeve?)

While I’ve read enough about C.S. Lewis to feel like I know what he’s getting at in his allegorical works, I recognize that the beauty of Christian allegory is that the Holy Spirit can illuminate it in ways that the author didn’t intend. As Lewis once wrote, “Apparently it is impossible for the wit of man to devise a narrative in which the wit of some other man cannot, and with some plausibility, find a hidden sense”.

That being said, while Lewis may not have always intended for me to hear his Narnian statements in the way that they hit me, I hope my upcoming posts bring you the same kind of wonder, excitement, and inquisitiveness that they bring me. Allegory is one of my favorite genres because it beckons us to find truth in its pages. The allegorical world is “true myth,” sometimes evoking incredible emotion as it becomes more real than the actual world we live in.

And so we turn our eyes toward Aslan as we travel further up and further in.