Until very recently, scholarship of C. S. Lewis’s beloved series The Chronicles of Narnia has understood the books to be a collection of heterogeneous material, either exuberantly and therefore inarticulately assembled, or sloppily pasted together with little concern for artistic unity. That is, until Michael Ward’s publication of Planet Narnia (Oxford University Press, 2008), which argues convincingly that the structure of the Chronicles is based on medieval cosmology, such that each book represents a specific planetary sphere; e.g., The Silver Chair, since it involves elements of insanity, mutability, silver, envy, and wateriness, is a clear reference to the medieval idea of the lunar sphere.

Jupiter, sphere of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe

Dr. Ward, whose demeanor incorporates British no-nonsense intelligence and Anglican modesty, graciously allowed Drunken Koudou to interview him by phone from his home in Oxford. As a blizzard in Charlottesville made the neighborhood outside my window look like Lantern Waste, I asked Dr. Ward about his book, his thoughts on medieval systems of thought, and the Narnia movies.

Drunken Koudou: Before we get started on other questions, could you talk a little bit about yourself, your work and your life thus far, what else you’ve written, and why you are in your current profession.

Michael Ward: I’m an Englishman, born and brought up in the south of England. I studied English, first of all, here at Oxford, then did a theology degree when I was training for the ministry in the Anglican Church. Then I combined those two degrees, English and Theology, in my Ph.D., which I did at St. Andrew’s in Scotland. That’s when I began to study C. S. Lewis seriously.

I’m an Anglican minister. I’ve been chaplain of Peterhouse in Cambridge for three and a bit years, and I’m now chaplain of St. Peter’s College in Oxford.

In addition to my Planet Narnia book, I edited a book of sermons on Heresies and How to Avoid Them: Why It Matters What Christians Believe. I’m currently editing The Cambridge companion to C. S. Lewis which is coming out later this year. Oh, and I’m Associate Editor of the online poetry service, PoemaDay, which I’m hoping will develop significantly in the coming year.

DK: For the benefit of our readers, in a paragraph or so, and in your own words, what is the premise of Planet Narnia?

MW: The premise of Planet Narnia is that there is a third level of meaning in the Narnia books. The first level of meaning everybody is obviously aware of, and that’s just that they’re good adventure stories that a child of five or six could understand. The second level is not so obvious, and that’s the biblical parallels – how Aslan is in many respects a Christ-like figure, and episodes of the Bible are kind of re-enacted: the gospel story in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe; creation in The Magician’s Nephew; and the last judgment in The Last Battle.

Mars, sphere of Prince Caspian

But then the third layer of significance, the fundamental layer, is a much deeper kind of theological purpose that C. S. Lewis had in mind – which was to say something about how Christ is not just a single, solitary, individual figure moving about a neutral stage doing things to people, but that he’s actually the one who makes the stage. He’s the inner meaning of history.

In order to communicate that, which is a rather sophisticated and complex theological point, Lewis turned to the images of the seven heavens, which he described as “spiritual symbols of permanent value.” And it’s out of those seven heavens that he constructed each Narnia book, so that there’s a symbolic harmony between how Aslan is portrayed, the plot he is part of, and all sorts of ornamental details, too.

DK: Have you found that most people you’ve talked to are receptive to this third level? In other words, did you encounter much skepticism when Planet Narnia was first published?

MW: I’ve been absolutely delighted with the response. Of course, I was hoping for a good response, because I think it’s a very persuasive case, but I’d say that the response has been even better than I had hoped. Nearly every Lewis scholar who has read the book is not only persuaded that I’m on the right track, but most of them are saying, this is amazing! How have we not seen this before? Because it makes such good sense of so many otherwise perplexing things about the Narnia books.

DK: While it’s fascinating to see this key in action, one of my questions when I first read the book was whether this in any way might reduce the Chronicles to a sort of codebook or simplistic roman a clef. I don’t think that, but have you encountered this kind of feeling elsewhere?

The Sun, sphere of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

MW: Actually no, I haven’t. Most people respond well – 95% of people do respond very positively indeed. Nearly all of those people think that it doesn’t damage the books in any way – it doesn’t reduce them to some kind of cryptic code or cipher. It enriches them; it shows them to be much more artistic and subtle. It doesn’t limit them to being a set of crossword clues.

While I have sometimes used the term “Narnia code,” as on the BBC documentary about Planet Narnia called “The Narnia Code,” the code in question isn’t a kind of numerological code or a cryptogram – it’s more like a genetic code, I think, like the code of the genes in our bodies. The fact that you can genetically analyze cells doesn’t at all explain the mystery of each human person: it just shows you how the cells are constructed. The end to which Lewis’s planetary scheme is put in each book – that’s a rich and marvelous thing.

DK: This medieval cosmological vision seems like such a rich ground for literature both in terms of content and of technique. Looking at the modern plane of literature, do you think there is a way for young authors today to recapture that kind of vision?

MW: That’s a difficult question. There are some writers who very explicitly have used this symbolic system. There was a novel written a few years ago by a novelist called Neal Stephenson which is called Quicksilver, which is itself built very explicitly out of the Mercury imagery. But I’m not quite sure that I see what you’re asking.

DK: When I look at the medieval vision, I’m struck not only by how everything seems to fit together, but that each thing in its place has such depth and richness of meaning. For instance, if I look at the seven heavens, or something like the even older idea of the Greek elements, I see all of these different personalities and images and associations. It feels like, in the modern era, we have some pantheonic figures like Mother Nature / Gaia, but we don’t really have that sort of comprehensive system in which there are instant associations and symbols that can be drawn from one model. My question is: Is there a way to recapture that way of looking at the world or do we need to do something new within our modern age?

MW: That’s a good question. I think that yes, you’re right in many respects. Those old symbols systems – the humors, the elements, the planets, and so on – most people aren’t familiar with those. In that respect, we’re in a poorer state than we used to be. Having said that, some writers who are well-read and learned in poetry and symbols realize that there are quite a few modern symbols, seemingly modern symbols, which nonetheless tap into much more traditional, ancient ways of thinking.

Luna, sphere of The Silver Chair

So that some people say that Superman is for us what Hercules was for the ancients, and Marilyn Monroe is a modern-day equivalent of Aphrodite. There are ways in which pop culture, even without trying necessarily, replays some of these ancient archetypes and tropes.

But whether it can be done more explicitly is a much more tricky question. Without getting too complex and philosophical about it, I think that maybe we’re not able to apply that kind of detailed or all-embracing set of symbolic systems to things because, well, because we’re postmoderns, aren’t we! We don’t believe in meta-narratives anymore, we don’t have overarching stories that we believe in. I mean, obviously Christians do; but in the non-Christian world, there’s a fragmentation setting in – everybody’s story is as good as everybody else’s, and there’s no kind of objective reality to which we need to conform.

So, I feel that without a major overhaul of our basic philosophical suppositions, I don’t really see that we’re going to get back to, or find contemporary versions of, the ways of thinking that you find in medieval and ancient world views.

DK: While I was in college I saw, and then elsewhere have seen a tendency of young Christians to go back to these medieval models as if they are beyond reproach and sacrosanct – looking back to a sort of Thomistic golden age. What do you think is the proper response of a Christian today to these medieval models?

MW: It’s easy to become a romantic about the past. Lewis himself, sometimes almost self-critically, remarks that he was a laudator temporis acti, a praiser of time gone by. But he thought that was a mistake; he didn’t think that there is any special magic about the past.

A major benefit that the knowledge of history can give us is that it allows us to have something to set against the present. We don’t know the future, but we need something to set against the present in order to give us some kind of anchor and bearings from the fleetingness of the present moment. That’s why Lewis liked studying the past and reading old literature – not because he thought the past was infallible – it’s not at all infallible, and there are all sorts of errors that are to be found in every age, every epoch – but they’re unlikely to be the same errors as those that we’re currently making. They provide a needed and a useful counterweight to our contemporary situation.

Mercury, sphere of The Horse and His Boy

DK: This is more a question of taste, but what is your favorite book out of the Chronicles and why?

MW: I’m torn between The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. If I was forced at the point of a gun to choose, I would say the Dawn Treader, which I think is just ravishingly beautiful, especially the last few chapters.

But The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe is, I think, in some ways the better book. It seems to me to be the book that Lewis was born to write. It has a certain kind of inevitability about it. It’s almost a perfect book – it sort of fell ready-made into his lap, I think.

DK: I’m curious, as an American: have you seen any of the recent films?

MW: Yes, I’ve seen them both.

DK: What is your opinion of them?

MW: I don’t think they’re very good, to be honest. They’re not half as good as, say, the recent Lord of the Rings films, either as adaptations or just as films. I mean, I could talk about this for a long time – I don’t how much you want me to explain.

DK: I guess I would ask if you think that the Chronicles lend themselves to film in the same way that Lord of the Rings seems to have, or if you think there is something about the Chronicles that makes them particularly more difficult to adapt to film.

MW: I think that the Narnia books are very well suited to adaptation. I don’t think there’s anything un-adaptable about them. They just need to be adapted well. And I don’t think that the two adaptations so far have been very skillfully done. I don’t think that the adaptors understood their source material.

Venus, sphere of The Magician's Nephew

Half of that may be because there has been this view that the Narnia books were slopped together, that they were a slapdash, hodgepodge, mishmash kind of thing, and therefore the adaptors may have thought, “Oh, Lewis didn’t construct these books with any great care; therefore, it doesn’t matter if we monkey about with them ourselves.” That may be one explanation, I don’t know.

For instance, in the first film, the adaptors, screenwriter, director – they didn’t understand the symbolic quality of the book. They thought, for instance, that the snow of Narnia, the winter, was a winter wonderland, and that it was a beautiful landscape, with lovely snowflakes falling on eyelashes and opportunities for snowball fights and things like that. But that’s just a misreading of the winter. The winter is a curse! And it’s not, except in one brief exception, described as beautiful. It’s a menacing kind of winter: it’s grim, it’s bad. Now that’s why the coming of spring and summer is so joyful. And the filmmakers didn’t seem to fully understand that.

I think they compounded the problem by turning the White Witch into this golden-haired character. In the book, of course, she has a face that is deadly white, and has black hair. There’s no life about her, no color to her at all, because she is a kind of personification of the deathliness of winter, which the Jovial influence in the book is going to counteract. But by giving her golden hair, the symbolism of her appearance is completely undercut. I can’t understand why you would do that; it seems to me to be sort of tone deaf, imaginatively speaking.

DK: Working off an earlier question, what do you see as the task, if any, of Christian authors in the next generation? And by that I mean, Lewis and his fellow Inklings saw the preservation of Western culture, against the abolition of man, as an important work for their time: do you think that this goal should be amended or pursued with equal diligence? Is there a specific objective that Christian authors should have today?

MW: Good question. I think that one of the most pressing problems facing us in the West is a tendency to view our bodies as raw materials that can be cut up and changed to suit whatever we happen to want them to be. We’ve begun to learn that we can’t do that to the environment, that we can’t treat the natural world as so much raw material to be cut up and disposed to suit our own fancy. But we still have to learn it with respect to our own bodies and persons.

If Christian writers can communicate something about the divine nature imaged in man and about the nature of masculinity and femininity, about the nature of the family and about the purpose of sex, and all those very personal, physical questions relating to our own bodies and natures, then I think that that’s a big, big project for a Christian writer to somehow achieve.

Saturn, sphere of The Last Battle

DK: What is your next big project? Are you set to unlock the key to understanding Lord of the Rings?

MW: [laughing] I like Lord of the Rings, but I’m not a great Tolkien scholar, so I don’t think that’s very likely. I mentioned that I’m editing this Cambridge companion to C. S. Lewis, which is my current project, and that’s coming out in September.

There are two other things that I’m working on. One is, I’m writing a much shorter, simpler version of Planet Narnia for a younger, less educated audience – that, hopefully, is going to be out by Christmas. Once those two things, that and the Cambridge companion, are out of the way, then I might get round to writing a proper, deep study of the Ransom trilogy. I’d like to do that at some point. Of course, it’ll be a big project, and will probably take me five years or so: don’t hold your breath.

DK: It’s been a real pleasure talking to you, Dr. Ward.

MW: Thank you for inviting me.

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