An Enchanted Education: It All Begins with a Story
Given the positive reception of the previous portion of my new book on education, I thought I would share this beginning of the first chapter. I hope you enjoy it. If you do, please consider donating (by clicking the button below) to help me have the time and resources to write and publish this book.
Chapter 1
It all begins with a story
When I was a boy, I inhabited a world where every copse on an Illinois farm was filled with creatures trying to hide from us. It was a world where I was constantly surrounded by a host of unseen companions who gathered at my calling, where the bells of Santa’s sleigh always rang late on Christmas Eve, where the woods in the Northwest were filled bigfoot and in the lakes and seas monsters like Nessie were known to live. Even as a schoolboy, I was certain that the Greek gods existed and that if I looked hard enough in Britain, I would find Arthur’s empty tomb. Some might worry that living such a life set me up for failure, and would certainly disabuse me of any belief in the God of Christianity. But it did not. Rather, this childish vision of reality prepared me for the deeper vision presented by Christianity.
Like many children, I came to this understanding of reality because of the stories I read and the films I watched. Stories and language are the starting point of an enchanted education, and they must come together. Attention to story without attention to language leads to castle-building in the clouds. There is no logic or reason, just images and emotion. Language without story, however, is a pure rationality the likes of which drives men mad.
Tolkien knew this well. It is why when he began to invent his elven languages, he immediately included stories with them. Even in his professional life as a professor of English Language (as opposed to English Literature, which his friend C.S. Lewis held), he knew that to study a language is to study the stories of that language. Beowulf is meaningless if all we do is study it for how to use certain Anglo-Saxon verb-forms, or to see where the caesura falls in a particular line. These things matter, they must be attended to, but we attend to them because they help unfold the story for us. Language is the way we not only perceive, but help shape the world around us. And every word brings with it a story.
Owen Barfield, a philosopher and Inkling alongside Lewis and Tolkien, understood this. He believed that rather than language beginning simplistically, word a equals set external reality b, then moving to the more metaphorical, that the metaphor and concrete meaning existed side-by-side from the beginning. Take a word like the Greek πνευμα. In ancient Greek this word could mean breath, wind, or spirit. The prevailing understanding of his day would say that first the word was used with one concrete meaning, perhaps breath. From there, it would be applied to the wind, the metaphorical breath of the world. Then, when humanity developed the desire to identify an invisible animating force, here was the word πνευμα ready to employed in a new, even more metaphorical way. Not so, says Barfield. Rather, the word meant all three at once. To breathe is to take in and send out the wind of the world and so also to invigorate the spirit, both the one within you and the spirit of the world. Every word we use, every word there is, contains within it a metaphor.
C.S. Lewis, following on from Barfield, comes to similar conclusions. He believes that a person who wishes to use the full-extent of a word, to truly engage in meaning, must, on the one hand attend to “the fossilized metaphors in his words.”1 Chip away at a word like influence, for instance, and you will find the Italian influenza, which meant a disease caught by a bad air. How did the air become bad? By the descent of the rays of the stars and planets, especially Saturn the bringer of pestilence and disease, onto our world. So a word which now means to have an effect on something has that meaning because of the effect Medievals believed the planets had on the world. Therefore, it also gave rise to our word flu, shortened from influenza, meaning a kind of sickness. Or take our English words tingle and twinkle. These words both come to us from the Anglo-Saxon tingol meaning star. So the twinkling nature of the stars is something quite inherent to them, we could almost say that the stars and starring. Similarly, the tingling sensation you get when a cool breeze runs across your neck as you stare at the stars at night may just be the stars themselves starring in you.
Lewis had a particular interest in language. Of course he would, words were his bread and butter. Yet he was interested in words themselves and how they bring themselves to us in meaning and story. In his book, That Hideous Strength, the planets, seen in their medieval aspect and character, descend on the company gathered at St. Anne’s. This is what he says when Mercury descends:
“Long before anything happened in the Blue Room the party in the kitchen had made their ten o’clock tea. It was while they sat drinking it that the change occurred. Up till now they had instinctively been talking in subdued voices, as children talk in a room where their elders are busied about in some august incomprehensible matter, a funeral, or the reading of a will. Now of a sudden they all began talking loudly at once, each, not contentiously but delightedly, interrupting the others. A stranger coming into the kitchen would have thought they were drunk, not soddenly but gaily drunk: would have seen heads bent together, eyes dancing, an excited wealth of gesture. What they said, none of the party could ever afterwards remember. Dimple maintained that they had chiefly been engaged in the making of puns. MacPhee denied that he had ever, even that night, made a pun, but all agreed that they had been extraordinarily witty. If not plays upon words, yet certainly plays upon thoughts, paradoxes, fancies, anecdotes, theories laughingly advanced yet (on consideration) well worth taking seriously, had flowed from them and over them with dazzling prodigality. Even Ivy forgot her great sorrow. Mother Dimble always remembered Camilla Denniston and her husband as they had stood, one on each side of the fireplace, in a gay intellectual duel, each capping the other, each rising above the other, up and up, like birds or aero planes in combat. If only one could have remembered what they said! For never in her life had she hear such talk––such eloquence, such melody (song could have added nothing to it), such toppling structures of double meaning, such skyrockets of metaphor and allusion.”2
While in the medieval understanding, it is Mercury’s brother Apollos, god of the Sun, who is associated with poetry and song, here we see Mercury bringing with him stories, theories, jokes, all things that depend on a close and intimate understanding of language. Note well the final sentence where Mercury is said to bring with him “skyrockets of metaphor and allusion.” He does not bring merely the words themselves, for there is no such thing as a word alone, unattended by something in reality. Rather, every word is imbued with the meaning of reality itself and can allude to it by the simplest suggestion.
Despite Mercury’s non-association with poetry in the classical or medieval worlds, Lewis does not let that stop him when Mercury descends directly on Ransom and Merlin.
“Upstairs this first change had a different operation. There came an instant at which both men braced themselves. Ransom gripped the side of his sofa; Merlin grasped his own knees and set his teeth. A rod of coloured light, whose colour no man can name or picture, darted between them: no more to see than that, but seeing was the least part of their experience. Quick agitation seized them: a kind of boiling and bubbling in mind and heart which shook their bodies also. It went to a rhythm of such fierce speed that they feared their sanity must be shaken into a thousand fragments. And then it seemed that this had actually happened. But it did not matter: for all the fragments––needle-pointed desires, brisk merriments, lynx-eyed thoughts––went rolling to and fro like glittering drops and reunited themselves. It was well that both men had some knowledge of poetry. The doubling, splitting, and recombining of thoughts which now went on in them would have been unendurable for one whom that art had not already instructed in the counterpoint of the mind, the mastery of doubled and trebled vision. For Ransom, whose study had been for many years in the realm of words, it was heavenly pleasure. He found himself sitting within the very heart of language, in the white-hot furnace of essential speech. All fact was broken, splashed into cataracts, caught, turned inside out, kneaded, slain, and reborn as meaning. For the lord of Meaning himself, the herald, the messenger, the slayer of Argus, was with them: the angel that spins nearest the sun. Viritrilbia, whom men call Mercury and Thoth.”3
The only reason Ransom and Merlin can survive a direct encounter with Language is because they were knowledgable in poetry. What is more, Lewis blasts any notion of language (or education for that matter) being about merely the transmission of facts. No, “All fact was broken, splashed into cataracts, caught, turned inside out, kneaded, slain, and reborn as meaning.” A fact is cold and alone and meaningless without the vivification of language, of metaphor.
Reality itself begins with language, with story. The author of Genesis shows us as much when he describes God as speaking reality into existence. And of course, what is it that God truly speaks? He speaks his Word, which is to say himself, the same and yet distinct. When that Word became flesh and dwelt among us, how did he primarily choose to teach? Through stories. This is no accident, Christ expressed himself through what he is, the Word, the Story and the Reason behind all that is, visible and invisible.
1 Lewis, “Bluspels and Flalansferes," 265.
2 C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength, 318.
3 C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength, 319.
