C.S. Lewis and Reality

This summer I had the pleasure of reading many of C.S. Lewis' works including "Mere Christianity", "The Problem of Pain", and "The Great Divorce." Much of what Lewis wrote about in "The Great Divorce" was relevant to the discussions we've had in class about reality. Plato divided experience into the universals (forms and concepts) and the particulars (bodies and shadows). Forms were most real, while shadows were the least real. The forms draw from the ultimate form which Plato called the Good or the Beautiful.

C.S. Lewis depicts heaven as more real than earth in "The Great Divorce". Mountains seem infinitely larger, water is unfathomably purer, and grass is stiff and sharp as wire with eternity. This reality, though, is not a rejection of the physical world. Instead, C.S. Lewis shows how heaven is the fulfillment of physical reality, not the rejection of it. God dwells physically and spiritually. While Plato considers the material world as inferior and negative, C.S. Lewis sees otherwise. God created the physical world and declared it good.

One encounter C.S. Lewis adds in his book is between a "ghost" who was once a painter and a resident of the high country. The painter who had died grew to be so engrossed in the process of painting that they forgot why it was they started painting in the first place. A section of the conversation is below.

“Why, if you are interested in the country only for the sake of painting it, you’ll never learn to see the country.” (Solid Person/Spirit)

“But that’s just how a real artist is interested in the country.” (Ghost of the painter)

“No. You’re forgetting,” said the Spirit. “That was not how you began. Light itself was your first love: you loved to paint only as a means of telling about light.”

“Oh, that’s ages ago,” said the Ghost. “One grows out of that. Of course, you haven’t seen my later works. One becomes more and more interested in paint for its own sake.” 

“One does, indeed. I also have had to recover from that. It was all a snare. Ink and catgut and paint were necessary down there, but they are also dangerous stimulants. Every poet and musician and artist, but for Grace, is drawn away from the love of the thing he tells, to love of the telling till, down in Deep Hell, they cannot be interested in God at all but only in what they say about Him. For it doesn’t stop at being interested in paint, you know. They sink lower—becoming interested in their own personalities and then in nothing but their own reputations.”

I think this reveals a lot about what Lewis considers the purpose and value of art to be in general. Art is a method to draw particular attention to a different attribute of God. When artists lose sight of Beauty and God, their art loses its power. I don't know if I completely agree with him, but it is an interesting thought.