Reality

Miracles 3.6 For Lewis Reality appears to be a correspondence reality -- this is the same as Aristotelian reality -- Truth and Reality are synonyms in this kind of thought because truth involves our statements having a correspondence with the reality that actually exists. Here Lewis uses the term "universe." He also uses the word "Valid" and the word "Theory." For Lewis "Valid" means that our thinking corresponds with reality "For that theory would itself have been reached by thinking and if thinking is not valid that theory would, of course, be itself demolished."

The word //realism// has one meaning in logic, where its opposite is nominalism, and another in metaphysics, where its opposite is idealism. In political language it has a third and somewhat debased meaning; the attitudes we should call 'cynical' in our opponents are called 'realistic' when our own side adopts them. //Experiment in Criticism//, chapter 7, paragraph 1

I have a capital story which is quite new to me. The hero is a certain Professor Alexander, a philosopher, at Leeds, but I have no doubt that the story is older than he. He is said to have entered a railway carriage with a large perforated cardboard box which he placed on his knees. The only other occupant was an inquisitive woman. She stood it as long as she could, and at last, having forced him into conversation and worked the talk round (you can fill in that part of the story yourself) ventured to ask him directly what was in the box. `A mongoose madam.' The poor woman counted the telegraph posts going past for a while and again could bear her curiosity no further. `And what are you going to do with the mongoose?' she asked. `I am taking it to a friend who is unfortu-nately suffering from delirium tremens.' ‘And what use will a mongoose be to him?' `Why, Madam, as you know, the people who suffer from that disease find themselves surrounded with snakes: and of course a mon-goose eats snakes.' `Good Heavens!' cried the lady, `but you don't mean that the snakes are real?' `Oh dear me, no said the Professor with imper-turbable gravity. `But then //neither is the mongoose!'// //Collected Letters,// to his father, 19 May 1929

Reality, in fact, is always something you could not have guessed. That's one of the reasons I believe Christianity. It is a religion you could not have guessed. //Mere Christianity//, chapter 2, paragraph 3

[Here] we touch on the very central region where all doubts about our religion live. Things do look so very much as if our whole faith were a substitute for the real well-being we have failed to achieve on earth. It seems so very likely that our rejection of the World is only the disappointed fox's attempt to convince himself that the unattainable grapes are sour. After all, we do not usually think much about the next world till our hopes in this have been pretty well flattened out --and when they are revived we not infrequently abandon our religion. And does not all that talk of celestial love come chiefly from monks and nuns, starved celibates consoling themselves with a compensatory hallucination? And the worship of the Christ child --does it not also come to us from centuries of lonely old maids? ... The theory that our religion is a substitute has a great deal of plausibility. //Religion, Reality or Substitute//? paragraph 2

Divine reality is like a fugue. All His acts are different, but they all rhyme or echo to one another... Our featureless pantheistic unities and glib rationalist distinctions are alike defeated by the seamless, yet ever-varying texture of reality, the liveness, the elusiveness, the intertwined harmonies of the multi-dimensional fertility of God. //Miracles//—a sermon, 2nd paragraph from the end

The elaborate world-pictures which accompany religion and which look each so solid while they last, turn out to be only shadows. It is religion itself--prayer and sacrament and repentance and adoration--which is here, in the long run, our sole avenue to the real. //Dogma and the Universe//, 2nd paragraph from the end

The words //incorporeal// and //impersonal// are misleading, because they suggest that He lacks some reality which we possess. It would be safer to call Him //trans-corporeal, trans-personal//. Body and personality as we know them are the real negatives--they are what is left of positive being when it is sufficiently diluted to appear in temporal or finite forms. Even our sexuality should be regarded as the transposition into a minor key of that creative joy which in Him is unceasing and irresistible. Grammatically the things we say of Him are “metaphorical": but in a deeper sense it is our physical and psychic energies that are mere "metaphors" of the real life which is God. Divine Sonship is, so to speak, the solid of which biological sonship is merely a diagrammatic representation on the flat. //Miracles//, chapter 11, paragraph 16

The argument runs like this. All the details are derived from our present experience; but the reality transcends our experience: therefore all the details are wholly and equally symbolical. But suppose a dog were trying to form a conception of human life. All the details in its picture would be derived from canine experience. Therefore all that the dog imagined could, at best, be only analogically true of human life. The conclusion is false. If the dog visualized our scientific researches in terms of ratting, this would be analogical; but if it thought that eating could be predicated of humans only in an analogical sense, the dog would be wrong. In fact if a dog could, //per impossible//, be plunged for a day into human life, it would be hardly more surprised by hitherto unimagined differences than by hitherto unsuspected similarities. A reverent dog would be shocked. A modernist dog, distrusting the whole experience, would ask to be taken to the vet.

But the dog can’t get into human life. Consequently, though it can be sure that its best ideas of human life are full of analogy and symbol, it could never point to any one detail and say, ‘This is entirely symbolic.’ You cannot know that everything in the representation of thing is symbolical unless you have independent access to the thing and can compare it with the representation. //Modern Theology and Biblical Criticism//, 3rd and 4th paragraphs from the end

But there is a sort of attack on the emotions which can still be tried. It turns on making him //feel//, when first he sees human remains plastered on a wall that this is "what the world is //really// like" and that all his religion has been a fantasy. You will notice that we have got them completely fogged about the meaning of the word "real". They tell each other, of some great spiritual experience, "All that //really// happened was that you heard some music in a lighted building"; here "real" means the bare physical facts, separated from the other elements in the experience they actually had. On the other hand, they will also say "It's all very well discussing that high dive as you sit here in an armchair, but wait till you get up there and see what it's //really// like": here "real" is being used in the opposite sense to mean, not the physical facts (which they know already while discussing the matter in armchairs) but the emotional effect those facts will have on a human consciousness. Either application of the word could be defended; but our business is to keep the two going at once so that the emotional value of the word "real" can be placed now on one side of the account, now on the other, as it happens to suit us. The general rule which we have now pretty well established among them is that in all experiences which can make them happier or better only the physical facts are "real" while the spiritual elements are "subjective"; in all experiences which can discourage or corrupt them the spiritual elements are the main reality and to ignore them is to be an escapist. Thus in birth the blood and pain are "real", the rejoicing a mere subjective point of view; in death, the terror and ugliness reveal what death "really means". The hatefulness of a hated person is "real"--in hatred you see men as they are, you are disillusioned; but the loveliness of a loved person is merely a subjective haze concealing a "real" core of sexual appetite or economic association. Wars and poverty are "really" horrible; peace and plenty are mere physical facts about which men happen to have certain sentiments. The creatures are always accusing one another of wanting "to eat the cake and have it"; but thanks to our labours they are more often in the predicament of paying for the cake and not eating it. Your patient, properly handled, will have no difficulty in regarding his emotion at the sight of human entrails as a revelation of Reality and his emotion at the sight of happy children or fair weather as mere sentiment. //Screwtape Letters//, Letter 30, last paragraph

All reality is iconoclastic; the earthly beloved, even in this life, incessantly triumphs over your mere idea of her. And you want her to; you want her with all her resistances, all her faults, all her unexpectedness. That is, in her foursquare and independent reality. And this, not any image or memory, is what we are to love still, after she is dead. //A Grief Observed//, chapter 4, paragraph 16

Very often, paradoxically, the first step is to banish the "bright blur"--or, in statelier language, to break the idol. Let's get back to what has at least some degree of resistant reality. Here are the four walls of the room. And here am I. But both terms are merely the facade of impenetrable mysteries.

The walls, they say, are matter. That is, as the physicists will try to tell me, something totally unimaginable, only mathematically describable, existing in a curved space, charged with appalling energies. If I could penetrate far enough into that mystery I should perhaps finally reach what is sheerly real.

And what am I? The facade is what I call consciousness. I am at least conscious of the colour of those walls. I am not, in the same way, or to the same degree, conscious of what I call my thoughts: for if I try to examine what happens when I am thinking, it stops happening. Yet even if I could examine my thinking, it would, I well know, turn out to be the thinnest possible film on the surface of a vast deep. //Letters to Malcolm//, chapter 15, paragraphs 5-7

A lie is a delusion only so long as we believe it; but a recognised lie is a reality--a real lie--and as such may be highly instructive. A dream ceases to be a delusion as soon as we wake. But it does not become a nonentity. It is a real dream: and it also may be instructive. A stage set is not a real wood or drawing room: it is a real stage set, and may be a good one. (In fact we should never ask of anything "Is it real?," for everything is real. The proper question is "A real what?," e.g., a real snake or real //delirium tremen//s?) The objects around me, and my idea of "me," will deceive if taken at their face value. But they are momentous if taken as the end-products of divine activities. Thus and not otherwise, the creation of matter and the creation of mind meet one another and the circuit is closed. //Letters to Malcolm//, chapter 15, paragraph 10

The Witch shook her head. "I see," she said, "that we should do no better with your lion, as you call it, than we did with your sun. You have seen lamps, and so you imagined a bigger and better lamp and called it the sun. You've seen cats, and now you want a bigger and better cat, and it's to so called a lion. Well, 'tis a pretty make-believe, though, to say truth, it would suit you all better if you were younger. And look how you can put nothing into your make-believe without copying it from the real world, this world of mine, which is the only world. But even you children are too old for such play. As for you, my lord Prince, that art a man full grown, fie upon you! Are you not ashamed of such toys? Come, all of you. Put away these childish tricks. I have work for you all in the real world. There is no Narnia, no Overworld, no sky, no sun, no Aslan. And now, to bed all. And let us begin a wiser life tomorrow. But first, to bed; to sleep; deep sleep, soft pillows, sleep without foolish dreams."

The Prince and the two children were standing with their heads hung down, their cheeks flushed, their eyes half closed; the strength all gone from them; the enchantment almost complete. But Puddleglum desperately gathering all his strength, walked over to the fire. Then he did a very brave thing. He knew it wouldn't hurt him quite as much as it would hurt a human; for his feet (which were bare) were webbed and hard and cold-blooded like a duck's. But he knew it would hurt him badly enough; and so it did. With his bare foot he stamped on the fire, grinding a large part of it into ashes on the flat hearth. And three things happened at once.

First, the sweet heavy smell grew very much less. For though the whole fire had not been put out, a good bit of it had, and what remained smelled very largely of burnt Marsh-wiggle, which is not at all an enchanting smell. This instantly made everyone's brain far clearer. The Prince and the children held up their heads again and opened their eyes.

Secondly, the Witch, in a loud, terrible voice, utterly different from all the sweet tones she had been using up till now, called out, "What are you doing? Dare to touch my fire again, mud-filth, and I'll turn the blood to fire inside your veins."

Thirdly, the pain itself made Puddleglum's head for a moment perfectly clear and he knew exactly what he really thought. There is nothing like a good shock of pain for dissolving certain kinds of magic. //The Silver Chair//, chapter 12, paragraphs 56-60