Tool Alpha
C. S. Lewis’s Cosmology
Where Lewis’s heavens follow Scripture, where they come from the medieval picture of the cosmos, and where he made them up.
Myth and fact
On Perelandra the line between myth and fact disappears. Lewis's hero comes to think that what is myth in one world may be fact in another.
2 Peter 1:16, in every translation this tool compares.
The real question: what did Lewis think myths were? A rumour that turns out to be true. Lewis's hero keeps meeting things on other worlds that he only knew as stories on this one. He comes to think our mythology is a distorted memory of something real.
Ransom remembers "his old suspicion that what was myth in one world might always be fact in some other." Later he realizes the division of truth from myth and of both from fact is purely terrestrial, a result of the Fall, and that the Incarnation was the beginning of its end. At the end he learns that our mythology is based on a solider reality than we dream, though at an almost infinite distance from it.
Peter insists the apostles did not follow cleverly devised myths but were eyewitnesses (2 Peter 1:16). Scripture's claim is that the gospel happened.
This is Lewis's own view of myth, worked out in his fiction and his essays. McGrath notes that by mythology Lewis meant something like a worldview or grand story.
Lewis's theory that pagan myths are faint memories of real celestial beings goes beyond anything Scripture says. Paul's account of idolatry in Romans 1 is harsher.
Not a claim that the gospel is a myth. Lewis's point is the reverse: the one story that is both myth and fact is the gospel.
- Lewis, Perelandra (1943), chs. 8, 11, 16
- McGrath, C. S. Lewis, A Life (2013), The Shift to Fiction: The Ransom Trilogy
