By Melissa Cain Travis
It has been nearly twenty-five years since my first reading of The Lord of the Rings. I’d never even heard of it until the first film of Peter Jackson’s trilogy made its grand debut in December of 2001, and I purchased a copy of the book immediately after that magical cinematic experience. Since then, I’ve read the book numerous times, and watching all eleven hours of the extended versions of the films has become the central tradition of the holiday season in the Travis household (I laugh every time my young adult sons call me their "geeky mom").
My discovery of Tolkien was a watershed event in my life; it resuscitated my love of great literature and played a key role in my growth towards a more robust Christian life of the mind. I’ve spent the ensuing years cultivating a broader and deeper acquaintance with great works of imaginative literature, including the novels of Tolkien’s fellow Inkling, C.S. Lewis, who I’d previously known only through Mere Christianity and The Screwtape Letters. I devoured the Narnia chronicles in 2006, although it wasn’t until several years later that I was exposed to scholars who helped me grasp the theological and philosophical richness of the series.
I now have an immense appreciation for the importance of imaginative stories in the context of Christian apologetics (the formal defense of the faith). For a long time, I had regarded apologetics as a discipline concerned only with philosophy, history, and science, with compiling evidence and constructing detective-style cases for the truth of Scripture's core claims. I'd been completely unaware of the branch known as cultural apologetics, which explores all the ways in which cultural artifacts, such as the visual arts, literature, music, cinema, theater, and even video games can be used to shed light on the Gospel. A major facet of cultural apologetics is something called imaginative apologetics, which you can think of as a story-based evangelistic technique. The objective is to open hearts and minds to the deeper truths of Christianity by appealing to the imagination.
A fantastical story, what literary scholars prior to the mid 20th century commonly referred to as a fairy tale, has the potential to pierce the soul of someone who may not be moved by straightforward theological conversations or by arguments and evidence. Lewis expressed this idea in his essay, “Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What’s to be Said”:
I wrote fairy tales because the fairy tale seemed the ideal form for the stuff I had to say...I thought I saw how stories of this kind could steal past a certain inhibition which had paralysed much of my own religion in childhood. Why did one find it so hard to feel as one was told one ought to feel about God or about the sufferings of Christ? I thought the chief reason was that one was told one ought to. An obligation to feel can freeze feelings...But supposing that by casting all these things into an imaginary world, stripping them of their stained-glass and Sunday school associations, one could make them for the first time appear in their real potency? Could one not thus steal past those watchful dragons?
Based upon his own conversion experience, Lewis knew that when we encounter imaginative stories, we let our guard down as we surrender ourselves to the pleasurable experience of the tale. On the plane of fantasy, we let go and naturally resonate with higher truths about evil (white witches and balrogs), virtue (Lucy and Samwise), and sacrificial love (Aslan and Gandalf). We ponder the reality of the dragons we too must fight and the heavy burdens we are sometimes called to bear with purity, yet not without grace from on high.
The necessity of divine grace is a powerful theme in the fantasy stories of Lewis and Tolkien. Perhaps the best known from Tolkien is the scene near the end of The Lord of the Rings, when Gollum becomes essential to the destruction of the One Ring after Frodo succumbs to its power. Thanks to the 2010 film adaptation, many are also familiar with Aslan’s atonement for Edmund’s sin in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. But another example, one that I find incredibly poignant, is the “un-dragoning" of Eustace Scrubb, the moment that crystalizes the major theological theme of Lewis’ third Narnia novel, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. (The power of the scene is somewhat lessened in the film adaptation; it truly must be read!) Even though Dawn Treader is about far more than this one particular character, the opening line of the book is a major clue about his centrality to the story:
“There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.”
Eustace is spiteful, selfish, and arrogant, but it’s not until he’s transformed into a literal dragon and the ugly viciousness of his soul is made visibly manifest that he realizes he’s a monster, even in the metaphorical sense. His dragonish heart, now with the outward appearance to match, begins to soften and long for the good—for authentic virtue, the forgiveness of his kindred, and for ultimate salvation from himself.
In the dark depths of Eustace’s misery, as he wonders what will become of him when the Dawn Treader sails away and he is left behind on the island in this hopeless state, Aslan appears and invites Eustace to follow him. They journey deep into the mountains and stop at a water well, where Aslan explains that Eustace must discard the dragon skin. Eustace thinks this is a task he must perform. At first, he seems to make progress by vigorously scratching off the scales and peeling away the tough skin, but then he looks down to see that he remains every bit a dragon. Twice more, with increasing desperation, he rends his own hide and tears it from his body, but his efforts are futile. He cannot un-dragon himself, no matter how hard he tries. Finally, Aslan explains that Eustace must allow him to do it. Eustace recounts:
The very first tear he made was so deep that I thought it had gone right to my heart. And when he began pulling the skin off, it hurt worse than anything I’ve ever felt. The only thing that made me able to bear it was just the pleasure of feeling the stuff peel off…And there was I as smooth and soft as a peeled switch and smaller than I had been. Then he caught hold of me—I didn’t like that much for I was very tender underneath now that I’d no skin on—and threw me into the water.
Thus, Aslan delivers Eustace from his terrible bondage and washes him in baptismal waters. It was only by the grace and power of the Great Lion that Eustace could be set free, made clean, and become more fully human than he’d ever been before.
Through this marvelous story, Lewis demonstrates how a beautiful, fantastial tale can awaken our longing for the Good and help us really see the meaning of theological ideas. When higher truths are communicated through engaging stories, we sense the truth of those truths in an intuitive way. In his essay, "Bluspels and Flalansferes," Lewis says that "reason is the natural organ of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning.” His point is that often, our imagination must be engaged so that we can internalize the wondrous meaning of a truth, even if we already understand the rational grounds for it. As Paul Gould writes in his excellent book, Cultural Apologetics: “Our imagination moves us in a way that nothing else does…We are captured by that which captivates our imagination, and once hooked, we’re hooked…Often it is the ‘aesthetic currency of the imagination—story, poetry, music, symbols, and images’ that God uses to awaken our desire.”
Goodness, truth, and beauty, conveyed through imaginative stories like the masterworks of Lewis and Tolkien, steal past the watchful dragons. To paraphrase Lewis' words in his conversion memoir, Surprised by Joy, the imaginative approach draws common things “into the bright shadow,” it helps re-enchant the hardened, wayward soul so that, by divine grace, scales will fall away and baptismal waters will stir.