To fully understand C.S. Lewis’ love for the imaginary—indeed, to understand the man himself—something must be said about the distinctively English world Faery. The world of Faery, which has its roots in Celtic culture, is not so easily categorized. It is not at all the land of delicate fairies that Walt Disney would have us imagine. Nor is it simply imaginary, a story altogether detached and unrelated to the world before us. Faery is, first, a place. It is lush and green like gentle British landscapes and ancient English forests, but forests untamed, willful, and enchanted—”a world, that sometimes overlaps with Britain but is fundamentally Other than it.”(1) Biographer Alan Jacobs hints at the importance of Faery on the imagination of Lewis, and in particular, this “old idea that Faery overlaps our world—that one can, unwillingly and unwittingly, pass from one into the other.”(2) Faery is both beautiful and dangerous, its boundaries unclear. The encounter with Faery and its tales, the “horns of Elfland faintly blowing,” was one that haunted Lewis much of his life.(3)

For Lewis, “the horns of Elfland” were heard and followed and dear, like arrows of Joy shot at him from childhood—through the death of his mother at the fragile age of nine, through the horrid years at boarding school, through the doubt and dismissal of faith and God, through the metaphysical pessimism and the deep layers of secular ice, through a dejected and reluctant conversion, to Narnia, and to the Joy itself.

Of course, this is not to say that the imaginative world in which Lewis lived was one fueled in any sense by Christianity or faith; nor were the imaginary worlds he loved anything one might necessarily call Christian. But it was an imagination nonetheless that shaped the way he viewed world—until he saw fit to abandon it all. Among other reasons for the distancing of his imagination, a new intellectual movement in psychology was becoming increasingly influential. As Lewis writes, “What we were most concerned about was ‘Fantasy’ or ‘wishful thinking.’… [W]hat, I asked myself, were all my delectable mountains and western gardens but sheer Fantasies?… With the confidence of a boy I decided I had done with all that… And I was never going to be taken in again.”(4) For a long line of atheists like Lewis at this time, where the Christian imagination possesses beauty and hope, it is because at heart the Christian religion is about wish fulfillment—even if it is, as some contend, a beautiful, imaginative delusion.

Of the many objections to Christianity, it is this one that stands out in my mind as troubling: that to be Christian is to withdraw from the world of reality, to follow fairy tales with wishful hearts and myths which insist we stop thinking and believe that all will be right in the end because God says so. In such a vein, Karl Marx depicted Christianity as a kind of drug that anesthetizes people to the suffering in the world and the wretchedness of life. Likewise, Sigmund Freud claimed that belief in God functions as an infantile dream that helps us evade the pain and helplessness we both feel and see around us. I don’t find these critiques and others like them particularly troubling because I find them accurate of the kingdom Jesus described. On the contrary, I find them troubling because there are times I want very much to live as if Freud and Marx are quite right in their analyses.

I was a seminary student when the abrupt news of cancer and jarring estimates of time remaining pulled me out of theology books and into my dad’s hospital room. The small church he attended was pastored by an energetic man whose bold prayers for healing chased doubt and dread out of the room like the pigs Jesus ran off a cliff: “Faith is being sure of what you hope for and certain of what you do not see.” He read this verse from Hebrews 11:1 to us repeatedly, imploring us to seize the promise of healing and to cast out even the smallest sign of doubt that our miracle would not happen. We simultaneously met with oncologists who told us it would be unlikely for dad to live more than six weeks. I had at my disposal, a faith and theology that could have uttered so many different responses. But we wanted the miracle so badly, I didn’t dare. So as if we were participants in a magic show doing our part for the trick, we followed the pastor’s rules, so much so that we didn’t talk about funeral plans or preferences until it was too late.

This is no doubt one moment when the imagination of faith was far more “wishful thought” than any thing else. Fear lived more powerfully in that prayer than trust or hope or even love. As a result, I know all too well the critique of Christianity as wish fulfillment to be a valid point, for in this instance, it was. “Yes! ‘wish-fulfillment dreams’ we spin to cheat / our timid hearts and ugly Fact defeat!”(5) And yet this is not to say that the wishing my father would live was itself invalid, that the hope we imagined was rootless, or that there is not One who moves us to wish in the first place. For indeed, “Whence came the wish, and whence the power to dream?” continues J.R.R. Tolkien in the very poem that would capture the doubting Lewis. In other words, if the material view of the world is true, why should we have such dreams in the first place? As Lewis would write later, using the same argument:

“[W]e remain conscious of a desire which no natural happiness will satisfy. But is there any reason to suppose that reality offers any satisfaction to it? Nor does the being hungry prove that we have bread. But I think it may be urged that this misses the point. A man’s physical hunger does not prove that that man will get any bread; he may die of starvation on a raft in the Atlantic. But surely a man’s hunger does prove that he comes of a race which repairs its body by eating, and inhabits a world where eatable substances exist.”(6)

For two young boys clinging together in the hallway as adults whispered about cancer and came and went from their mother’s room, Flora’s death was the event whereby “everything that had made the house a home had failed us.”(7) As his mother lay dying, nine year-old Clive Lewis prayed that she would live. Alan Jacob describes Jack’s prayer for her recovery: “He had gotten the idea that praying ‘in faith’ was a matter of convincing yourself that what you were asking for would be granted. (After Flora had died he strove to convince himself that God would bring her back to life.)”(8) Lewis insists the disappointment of these failed prayers—not to a Savior or a Judge but, like me, to something more of a magician—was not formative to his young sense of faith. No doubt the longing for his mother to be well again, for home to be restored, and for someone to hear this deep wish made its mark on his imagination, nonetheless. A scene in the Magician’s Nephew perhaps says more:

“Please—Mr. Lion—Aslan, Sir?” said Digory working up the courage to ask. “Could you—may I—please, will you give me some magic fruit of this country to make my mother well?”(9)

Digory, at this point in the story, had brought about much disaster for Aslan and his freshly created Narnia. But he had to ask. In fact, he thought for a second that he might attempt to make a deal with Aslan. But quickly Digory realized the Lion was not the sort of person with which one could try to make bargains.

Lewis then recounts, “Up till then the child had been looking at the lion’s great front feet and the huge claws on them. Now in his despair he looked up at his face. And what he saw surprised him as much as anything in his whole life. For the tawny face was bent down near his own and wonder of wonders great shining tears stood in the lion’s eyes. They were such big, bright tears compared with Digory’s own that for a moment he felt as if the lion must really be sorrier about his mother than he was himself.”

“My son, my son,” said Aslan. “I know. Grief is great. Only you and I in this land know that yet. Let us be good to one another…”(10)

Christianity is indeed on some level wishful thinking. For what planted in us this longing, this ache of Joy? Yet it is far from an invitation to live blind and unconcerned with the world of suffering around us, intent to tell feel-good stories or to withdraw from the harder scenes of life with fearful wishes. Digory discovers in Aslan what the Incarnation offers the world—a God who, in taking our embodiment quite seriously, presents quite the opposite of escapism. The story of Rachel weeping for her slaughtered children beside the story of the birth of Jesus is one glimpse among many that refuses to let us sweep the suffering of the world under the rug of unimportance. The fact that it is included in the gospel that brings us the hope of Christ is not only what makes that hope endurable, but what suggests Freud and Marx are entirely wrong. Christ brings the kind of hope that can reach even the most hopeless among us, within even the darkest moments, when timid hearts spin pained wishes. Jesus has not overlooked the suffering of the world or our deep longings within it anymore than he has invited his followers to do so; it is a part of the very story he tells.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) Alan Jacobs, The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C.S. Lewis (San Francisco: Harper, 2005), 16.

(2) Ibid., 18.

(3) Alfred Tennyson, “The Princess,” Alfred Tennyson: The Major Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 151.

(4) Lewis, C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life (Orlando: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1955), 203.

(5) J.R.R. Tolkien, as quoted in Alan Jacobs, The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C.S. Lewis (San Francisco: Harper, 2005), 145.

(6) Jacobs, 146.

(7) Lewis, 19.

(8) Jacobs, 5.

(9) C.S. Lewis, The Magician’s Nephew (New York: HarperCollins, 1955), 168.

(10) Ibid.