C.S. Lewis organized his classic children’s series “The Chronicles of Narnia” around the pre-Copernican medieval concept of a universe with seven heavens, according to Michael Ward, a senior research fellow at Oxford University and author of “Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C.S. Lewis.”
“Lewis’s best-known works, the seven Chronicles of Narnia, are, I believe, structured according to the seven heavens of the medieval cosmos,” Ward, best-remembered at Hillsdale as the 2015 commencement speaker, told a packed Phillips Auditorium during a lecture hosted by the history department on Thursday, Oct. 1.
Ward’s lecture, based on his dissertation, was entitled “Great Balls of Fire: C.S. Lewis, Narnia, and Medieval Cosmology.”
“I have to admit, it is a very large claim that I’m making,” Ward said. “Lewis had a deliberate and intentional design behind the Narnian Chronicles which he told nobody about and which nobody spotted for 50 or 60 years until I came along.”
The theory that would become Ward’s dissertation first popped into his head while he was completing his doctoral studies at Oxford. According to Ward, the question of how the Chronicles of Narnia are organized—why they’re written the they are—has long posed an “imaginative conundrum” to Lewis scholars. Is the series a hodgepodge of disparate elements, or does it have a central governing organization?
“Lewis was not at all a characteristically random or slapdash thinker,” Ward said. “He was a very rigorous and consistent thinker who loved intricacy and complexity of all kinds.”
Such a thinker, according to Ward, must have given the Chronicles an underlying thematic structure.
His thesis is that each of the Narnian books can be examined through the lens of one of the seven heavens of the old pre-Copernican, geocentric cosmos espoused by medievals such as Dante and Chaucer. Each medieval heaven had its own planet: the moon, Mercury, Venus, the sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn.
“The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe,” for instance, includes references to Jupiter, king of the gods, throughout.
“Kingliness is Jupiter’s main quality,” Ward said. And indeed, the book is pervaded with themes of kingship. “The story is really a clash of kingship between Peter and Edmund, and Aslan demonstrates true kingship in his role for Edmund’s sake.”
“Prince Caspian,” on the other hand, contains the imagery of Mars, the god of war.
“It’s the civil war book of Narnia, a very martial book,” Ward said. “The word martial itself appears a couple of times.”
But after tracing similar threads through brief readings of each of the seven books,Ward was sure to point out why Lewis chose to structure the Chronicles this way—not merely as an interesting schematic organization, but because each book, each planet, each god reflects something true about Christ and how Aslan represents Christ in the series.
“The most serious reason why I think Lewis might have done this is the theological reason,” Ward said. “The whole Narnia series is about Christ, Lewis said. By taking these seven spiritual symbols, Lewis is able to depict Christ under seven different veils — a technique of transferred classicism — where God can be depicted as the true Jupiter, the king; the true Mars, the commander; the true Sol, the light of the world; and son on, seven times.”
Ward’s speech was peppered with the characteristic wit that endeared him to Hillsdale students at the 2015 Commencement.
“The BBC got interested in my dissertation for the book ‘Planet Narnia’ and commissioned a television documentary called ‘The Narnia Code,’” Ward joked. “Please excuse the title, it’s got nothing to do with the DaVinci Code — this is serious scholarship.”
And with a typically British-sounding conclusion, Ward wrapped up his speech by telling the audience: “So that’s my theory, and I rather hope you like it.”
