C.S. Lewis on the Imagination

Lessons from The Chronicles of Narnia

If your childhood was anything like mine, you often found yourself lost in Narnia: the stories that took you beyond the four walls of your bedroom, through the wardrobe in the attic, and into an exhilarating world of magic, prophecy, and mythic beasts.

But like many of the things that sing to us in childhood, revisiting Narnia as adults can unlock entirely new levels of meaning.

It’s well known to most that Lewis’s Chronicles are religious stories, written by a devout Anglican who imbued them with Christian allegories and ethics. However, they were not written for any straightforward moralizing or evangelizing purpose.

Rather, Lewis understood that fantasy tales are to be experienced at a much deeper level than didactic allegory. By composing Narnia, he was attempting to awaken a mindset shift in all of us; one that transformed his own life in his early thirties.

Narnia is instructive because it reveals why adults need mythic stories — and their own imaginations — even more than children do…