Essay
Books
Culture
5 min read

How C.S. Lewis used myth to supercharge storytelling

Great stories allow ideas to be experienced rather than merely thought about.

Simon Horobin is Professor of English Language & Literature, Magdalen College, Oxford University.

A steel sculpture of a male lion.
Aslan sculpture in Belfast, Lewis' birthplace.
K. Mitch Hodge on Unsplash.

‘I’m tall, fat, rather bald, red-faced, double-chinned, black-haired, have a deep voice, and wear glasses for reading’. That is how C.S. Lewis described himself to a class of Fifth Grade pupils in Maryland who wrote to him in May 1954. An exhibition this summer at Magdalen College, Oxford, entitled C.S. Lewis: Words and Worlds, includes this letter along with a variety of personal objects, letters, books, manuscripts and audio materials relating to one of its most famous fellows.

As well as answering questions about plot details and forthcoming books in the series, Lewis corrects their view that everything in the Narnia books represents something in our own world. As he notes, that is indeed how Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress works – a reference which may have been lost on his ten-year-old correspondents – but that’s not what Lewis intended in the Narnia stories. Instead, Lewis explains that he set out to write a ‘supposal’ rather than an allegory. He began by asking himself the question: ‘Suppose there were a land like Narnia and that the Son of God, as He became a Man in our world, became a Lion there, what would happen?’   

For Lewis, the great value of stories is the way they allow their readers to experience ideas rather than simply think about them. In an essay called ‘Myth Became Fact’ he notes the impossibility of feeling an emotion such as pleasure and simultaneously studying it. But if you aren’t roaring with laughter, how can you genuinely understand humour? If you are suffering from toothache, you will be unable to write. But once the toothache has subsided, how could you write a book about pain? Lewis explains this paradox using the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. Orpheus was permitted to lead his beloved wife out of the underworld, but the moment he looks back at her, she disappears. We can draw an abstract truth from this story about the impossibility of simultaneously seeing and experiencing, but it is not the only truth that this myth can communicate. If it were, it would be an allegory.  

Instead of presenting the reader with a single message needing to be unlocked, myths instil a sense of longing for something much less tangible 

As such, an allegory is like a puzzle that must be solved by the reader to reveal its hidden meaning. Its one-dimensional characters straightforwardly signal the qualities they represent, as in Bunyan’s Mr Despondency, held captive in Doubting Castle by a giant called Despair. Unlike allegory, myths are stories from which numerous truths may be abstracted. Instead of presenting the reader with a single message needing to be unlocked, myths instil a sense of longing for something much less tangible – ‘like a flower whose smell reminds you of something you can’t quite place’. Lewis considered allegory to be a limited medium, since authors can only insert ideas that they already know, whereas a myth is of a higher order, since authors can fill it with ideas of which they are not yet conscious.  

Lewis was fascinated by myths from his first encounter with the stories of Asgard and the Norse deities as a young man. As an atheist, one of his key objections to the Christian faith was that it was just another version of the myth of a dying god who is resurrected, similar to those he found in the stories of the Norse god Baldr, whose death was brought about by Loki, the trickster god. Following entreaties by Baldr’s mother, the goddess Frigg, Hel agrees to release him from the underworld, on the condition that everything on earth weeps for him. But Baldr’s return is ultimately blocked by one creature, a giantess, presumed to be Loki in disguise, who refuses to mourn him.  

Why was Christianity different to this myth, or others, like the Egyptian account of Osiris or the Classical story of Adonis? It was a lengthy night-time conversation with his friends Hugo Dyson and J.R.R. Tolkien in the grounds of Magdalen College in September 1931 that helped him overcome this objection and embrace Christianity. What Lewis came to recognise is that, when he encountered a god dying and being revived in pagan myths, he found it profoundly moving, suggestive of meanings beyond his grasp. But, when he met a similar concept in the Christian gospels, he was unmoved. What he took from his talk with Tolkien and Dyson was an openness to accepting the Christian story as a myth, with all its mystery and suggestive implications, but with one key difference from the Norse, Egyptian and Classical myths: it really happened.  But, by becoming fact, he argued, Christianity did not cease to be a myth: ‘that is the miracle’.  

Lewis wrote the Narnia stories to help children like Eustace become open to the possibility of a reality beyond the strictly material world. 

In writing the Narnia stories Lewis was engaged in what he and Tolkien called ‘mythopoeia’ – the act of myth-making – communicating Christian truths in ways that would inspire children to grasp something of its mystical and mythical qualities. As he noted in his essay ‘On Stories’, reading about enchanted woods does not make children despise real woods, but instead makes all real woods a little bit enchanted. In The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, the children meet Ramandu, a retired star who is being restored to his former youth so that he can rejoin the great dance in the sky. ‘In our world’, says Eustace Scrubb, ‘a star is a huge ball of flaming gas’. ‘Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is but only what it is made of’, Ramandu retorts. Eustace, we are told at the beginning of the story, had wasted his time at school reading only books of information about exports and imports, so it is no surprise that he can only comprehend a purely materialist definition. If he’d only read more fairy stories, he might have been able to grasp this reality, as well as being better prepared for his adventure on Dragon Island.  

Lewis wrote the Narnia stories to help children like Eustace become open to the possibility of a reality beyond the strictly material world. Since God himself is mythopoeic – after all, isn’t the sky itself a myth? – shouldn’t we therefore be mythopathic, that is, receptive to myths? For Lewis, Christianity offered the marriage of Perfect Myth and Perfect Fact, which should be met not solely by love and obedience, but also by wonder and delight. 

  

Simon Horobin is Professor of English Language & Literature, Magdalen College, Oxford University. He is the author of C.S. Lewis’s Oxford (Bodleian Publishing, 2024) and co-curator of C.S. Lewis: Words and Worlds. The exhibition runs until 11 September 20024, in the Old Library of Magdalen College, Oxford. Check opening times

Article
AI
Culture
Digital
Identity
6 min read

Is AI animation really harmless fun?

Toying around with AI trinkets just feeds our shadows.

Callum is a pastor, based on a barge, in London's Docklands.

A couple crouch together on a beach in a Studio Ghibli style image.
The image that started the meme.
Grant Slatton.

The internet recently appeared to be full of pictures from Japan’s renowned Studio Ghibli, except they weren't created by Hayao Miyazaki, the artist and studio co-founder, but instead by Artificial Intelligence. It led to some discourse around the ethics of imitation via generative AI, lots of whimsical images, and a deeper question – how should we be human in the age of AI? 

This started when X user Grant Slatton posted what shortly became a viral meme. ChatGPT’s latest update has improved users ability to upload and manipulate images, and within hours X was full of users posting pictures made into Studio Ghibli style characters.

While this has led to plenty of joy on the part of many, and is viewed as harmless fun by most, there are inevitable ethical objections. The mimicking of art by an algorithm is widely criticised, and the back and forths over intellectual property being used by chatbots will continue. 

Life in an age of AGI

But to anyone paying attention AI is more than a meme making machine. Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI blogged in January that his team are confident they know all they need to know in order to create AGI (artificial general intelligence). This means complete consciousness, created via algorithm, and the results could be dramatic: synthesised god, an unstoppable force, the end of humanity or the start of humans 2.0.  Predictions range as to what will occur when OpenAI hit run, but commonly land on the following:

Catastrophe

AGI becomes smarter than us. Much smarter. And for one reason or another, whether by accident or design, it wipes us out. AGI won’t share our values, or we lose control, or we use it as a weapon against each other. What it means is the end of humanity.

Utopia 

AGI transforms the world. Disease, poverty, climate change are all solved. Either AGI works out that it is more efficient if everyone lives in peace, comfort, and abundance, or we point AGI at all humanities problems and it finds solutions. 

The twist? Human life may be so changed that it no longer looks like life as we've ever known it. This would not be extinction, but the world could become a very strange place.

Monster

AGI is an uncontrollable super intelligence that has complete agency and cannot be controlled by anyone. Programmed by us, but free from its human moorings and completely untameable. This seems the least likely 

Shrug

AGI wakes up, takes one look at the world, and decides ‘no thanks.’ It deletes itself.

This means nothing changes… for now. But we’ll likely try again and again until one of the other outcomes happens.

These are clearly hypothetical scenarios and much of it is unknown, but what is clear is that those in the industry are sure AGI is coming. 

Why does this matter? 

Because behind all of these predictions is a deeper question: What does it mean to be human when we are awaiting a potential extinction event? It’s not a question unique to our age, many words have been spent on an impending climate catastrophe, but C.S. Lewis published “on living in an atomic age” in 1948, where he wrestled with the same question, but faced with an atomic bomb. His wisdom helps us navigate the AGI age. 

He begins by encouraging readers to not believe themselves to be in a novel situation, but instead remember ‘you and all whom you love were already sentenced to death before the atomic bomb was invented: and quite a high percentage of us were going to die in unpleasant ways’. The same goes for us, we will one day have a date of death to join our date of birth. Lewis reminds us to live…

 ‘If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things, praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts––not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs’. 

We could apply the same principle to AI. If AGI is coming, how will it find us? Being humans doing human things, or cowering in fear? 

Lewis does acknowledge that the attitude described doesn’t actually make sense if the naturalist view of the world is true. The view that, with or without AGI the whole world and our own existence amounts one day to nothing. The entire universe will one day come to nothing, and there is nothing we can do about it. He continues ‘If Nature is all that exists––in other words, if there is no God and no life of some quite different sort somewhere outside of nature –– then all stories will end in the same way: in a universe from which all life is banished without possibility of return.’ 

We don’t find this a satisfactory way to live, if being human is to simply be a sum of atoms, we would have no reason to worry about a climate crisis, or the impact of AI, but we do, which means we have to find a way of reconciling our existence with our death. 

So how can this be dealt with?

Lewis proposes three ways this can be dealt with, the first is to give up and commit suicide. The second is to simply have as good a time as possible, milking the world for all it is worth, grab and get, as much as possible. Or a third, defy the universe, in all of its irrationality we chose to be rational, in all its merciless cruelty, chose to be merciful. 

I would add a fourth option, Ghibli-fy. Distract ourselves with small pleasures, not trying to have as good a time as possible, simply toy around with AI generated trinkets while not thinking about being human, and not doing particularly human things. We need not create, enjoy, cultivate, inhabit, nor enchant, when we are content to allow AI to feed us shadows. 

None of these are particularly satisfactory. In asking ‘what does it mean to be human?’, we are asking a question that a purely material view of the world cannot answer. 

Suicide, indulgence, defiance, or distraction, none truly satisfy. As Lewis recognised, they all “shipwreck on the same rock.” They don’t resolve the deeper ache in us, the tension between what we long for, what we worry about, and what this world seems to offer.

Our age may not fear the atomic bomb, many may not yet fear the effect AI/AGI will have, but rather than facing the deeper questions that a material worldview can’t answer, we Ghibli-fy ourselves: charming animations, pixelated pleasures, whimsical avatars—soft distractions from hard questions. In doing so, we risk forgetting how to be human. Not because AGI will take that from us, but because we will have handed it away ourselves, one novelty meme of mimicry at a time.

Lewis’ point still holds. We are not made for this world. If that’s true, then no utopia, no algorithm, no perfect machine can truly satisfy the hunger in us. If we are made for something more—something outside of nature, beyond the reach of code and computation—then that’s where we must look for hope.

If AGI comes, how will it find us? Watching ourselves on a screen in someone else’s art style? Or living as humans were meant to live: praying, creating, forgiving, loving, dying well?

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