Signs of Lewis' Teachings

In thinking about Orual, my mind kept thinking back to something in LWW so here's my attempt at dusting off some former thoughts in my brain to make connections to our more recent reading:

In two of Lewis’ works, there is the idea that signs of supernatural occurrences happen in the “real” world. Yet, humans have a hard time explaining these signs. The first case occurs in LWW when Lucy finds Narnia and everyone accuses her of lying. The second case is found in Till We Have Faces when Pysch is trying to convince Orual that her palace existed. In both cases, the signs were revealed more clearly to one party and, initially, just as Peter and Susan jumped to the conclusion that Lucy is mad and telling lies, Orual also believed that Psych had gone mad.

Both cases have evidence that their accused is being truthful. In the first example with Peter and Susan we all know they end up seeing Narnia for themselves. The second example with Orual comes after she denies that Psych’s palace exists but then, later in the night, if only for a moment, she notes, “When I lifted my head and looked once more into the mist across the water…There stood the palace, grey…but solid and motionless,” (Faces:132).

However, the accusers in both stories still doubted the signs and they did not know how to deal with them for in the words of Peter (and the suggested thoughts of Orual), “if things are real, they’re there all the time,” but both cases end with the professor’s question: “Are they?” (LWW 52).

Peter’s question to the professor and Orual’s accusation against the gods were logical for in their physical worlds for if something exists, it exists constantly in some form (because it can be neither created nor destroyed). In the minds of Peter, Susan and Orual, reasonable logic (as the professor pointed out) should have been enough evidence that the person they accused was in their right mind because both Psych and Lucy looked as though they were sane and both had a history of telling the truth. Yet, they were still accused of seeing something false.

These two cases seem to reveal two ideas; one is that if humans are to use logic, they must apply it to the human component of the story, meaning the person telling about the supernatural thing to help decide whether to believe the sign or not. Second, worldly logic does not seem to be enough to satisfy the accusers’ accusations, which suggests that humans cannot use their worldly logic or reason to explain the supernatural things they hear about. As a result, I’ve come to think that the message Lewis wants to portray in his books is that people must first check the source of the information to help them determine of the sign is real. Once, they determined that the sign could be real, is that it is not the human job to explain the signs; the signs are given to aid the human understanding of something that seems beyond their grasp, something behind our physical logic. Signs heard of are occur for a reason and time is the only answer for to gain understanding.