Step into the Light, Part 3: The Mythic Union of Contemplation and Enjoyment

By Annie Crawford

In the first part of this series exploring Lewis’s essay “Meditation in a Toolshed,” Annie Crawford describes the distinction C.S. Lewis drew between two essential modes of knowledge: Contemplation (objective observation from the outside) and Enjoyment (experiential, participatory knowledge from within). In the second part, Crawford explains how Lewis used this distinction to show that faith is not merely an intellectual assent to doctrinal truths but, above all, a participatory, personal relationship with Christ that illuminates all of life through the light of His presence.

In this final reflection on Lewis’s essay, Crawford argues that an effective apologetic for the Christian faith will lead others to both rationally understand Christianity as historical fact and imaginatively experience it as a living reality by using myths and stories to bridge abstract knowledge and personal experience.

If you missed previous articles in this series, you can click the links below to catch up!

• Step into the Light, Part 1: Contemplation and Enjoyment in the Work of C.S. Lewis

• Step into the Light, Part 2: The Necessity of Surrender

• Step into the Light, Part 3: The Mythic Union of Contemplation and Enjoyment

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If becoming a Christian is a radical step into an utterly new and committed reality, how can the reluctant lover be wooed to the altar? If the Enjoyment of Christ cannot be truly known from the outside, how can we as Christians help others taste and see that the Lord is good? How can one gain enough understanding of Christ from the outside to desire this “total surrender, the absolute leap in the dark” inside of faith?¹

What made Lewis willing to take such an awesome step himself? Thinking alone cannot lead us into the experience of Christ. In one sense, the more we think about belief in Christ, the further we push ourselves away from it. So long as we are thinking about repentance, Lewis told us, we are not truly repenting. Abstract thought can be a powerful way of keeping ourselves at a distance from reality.

In the essay “Myth Became Fact,” Lewis explores this paradoxical tension between “Enjoyment” and “Contemplation” further. He explains that “while we are loving the man, bearing the pain, enjoying the pleasure we are not intellectually apprehending Pleasure, Pain or Personality.”² The moment we Contemplate these states of Enjoyment, we have stepped outside of them. “Nearly everything that was going on a moment before is stopped by the very act of our turning to look at it,” and all we have left is an echo or residue of the thing itself.³

Thus, Lewis argues that we are trapped in a dilemma, “either to taste and not to know or to know and not to taste… The more lucidly we think, the more we are cut off; the more deeply we enter into reality, the less we can think.”⁴ We cannot simply think ourselves into tasting. At some moment, we must stop thinking and taste. Yet is there no way to test the waters before we take the plunge? How can we know that the thing we are Enjoying—this person, this pleasure, or this pain—is true and good and worth experiencing unless we step outside to look at it analytically?

Myth as a “Partial Solution”

According to Lewis, myths provide a “partial solution” to the dilemma of our bifurcated knowledge: “In the enjoyment of a great myth we come nearest to experiencing as a concrete [reality] what can otherwise be understood only as an abstraction.”⁵ By “myth,” Lewis means any story that embodies universal meaning through a symbolic story structure. Myths transform our abstract ideas into an imaginative reality we can experience.

For example, Lewis argues that myth can help us experience the paradoxical tension between Contemplation and Enjoyment. If we connect the abstract “vanishing of tasted reality as we try to grasp it with the discursive reason” to the tale of “Orpheus and Eurydice, how he was suffered to lead her by the hand but when he turned round to look at her, she disappeared, [then] what was merely a principle becomes imaginable.”⁶ In other words, the abstract idea that we cannot think about pleasure and experience it at the same time can be imaginatively experienced as true through the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. In the great stories, we are able to taste reality in a way that gives life to our abstractions. In myth, we can Enjoy that which is Contemplated.

Thus, mythic narratives give us a way to experience truths not yet manifested in our own lives. Over time, we can make many connections between abstract, Contemplated truths and Enjoyed, mythical realities. These meaningful connections between our two ways of knowing build trust not just in abstract knowledge but in a lived understanding.

But what has myth to do with Christ? In “Myth Became Fact,” Lewis explains that “as myth transcends thought, incarnation transcends myth. The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact, The old myth of the dying god, without ceasing to be myth, comes down from the heaven of legend and imagination to the earth of history.”⁷ This understanding of Christ as the “myth which is also a fact” formed the central part of Lewis’s own conversion.

Good Stories and the Reality of Christ

Because reality itself is a mythic story—or, as Lewis says in a letter telling Arthur Greeves of his conversion, “Christianity is God expressing Himself through what we call ‘real things’”—all our human stories participate to some degree in the reality of Christ.⁸ Every good story is in some way a reflection of the Great Story—the incarnation, death, and resurrection of God. When we read or tell one another a good story, we are tasting—Enjoying—truths about Christ.⁹ Through dialectic connections between myth and abstraction, between Enjoyment and Contemplation, we can taste enough of what Christ is like to discover our own deep longing for submersion into the full reality. Through mythic stories, we begin to better see the blazing beauty of Christ. Through the longing awakened by the beauties of Narnia or the majesty of Middle Earth, we can learn enough about what the life of Christ is like that we dare desire to plunge into the holy fire itself.

When the meaning of Christianity is experienced through good stories, then the truth and beauty of the Gospel can not only be seen and grasped but desired by those who would otherwise never be open to a direct evangelical argument. In her book Apologetics and the Christian Imagination, Holly Ordway tells how the stories of J.R.R. Tolkien and Lewis changed her from a staunch atheist to a committed Christian. Raised in an agnostic family, she had no interest in church or religion. However, Holly writes, “I read fantasy, fairy tales, and myths, and especially fell in love with the Chronicles of Narnia and The Lord of the Rings. I didn’t know I was encountering God’s grace through those books, but in fact I was.”¹⁰

As Ordway reminds us, we are all “assailed by competing claims for our loyalty of heart and mind; we are constantly being tempted, distracted, and confused; we need to be nourished and strengthened in mind, heart, and will.”¹¹ Good stories nourish the soul—and we postmoderns are desperately hungry. The more we see the Gospel reflected in our favorite stories, the more the Gospel will mean to us. When I come to see that every story I love has one thing in common—the reflection of Christ—I am led to realize that the thing I really love is Jesus. He is the Hero that thrills me in every adventure, the Love I long for in every romance, the Friend I admire in every novel of manners, the Mind I relish in all clever prose, and the Beauty that delights me in every imaginary world.

The Final Leap

When we finally take that step and participate in the life of Christ through active faith, myth’s “partial solution” becomes complete. In our union with Christ through the grace of the sacraments, we enter the life of the Trinity, which resolves the brokenness of our split understanding. Baptized into the life of Christ, we can look along the beam of the Spirit. Enjoying His life and light, we look at the beauty of Christ, in whom we see the face of the Father. To Enjoy the Spirit is to Contemplate Christ, who is the perfect, visible image of the Father, and, in this mystic union, we will one day know God fully, even as we are now fully known by Him.¹²

Thus, Lewis understood the role of apologetics as leading the unbeliever through both Contemplation and Enjoyment into a holistic understanding of Christ. Through the interplay of reason and imagination, the apologist must help others “both assent to the historical fact and also receive the myth (fact though it has become) with the same imaginative embrace which we accord to all myths. The one is hardly more necessary than the other.”¹³ Through Contemplation, we ought to examine religion and philosophy and look for a reasonable faith. One should “look at” the various beams carefully, thinking hard and seeking truth. But more than the acceptance of fact is required for saving faith. Through story and relationship, we must also begin to taste and see the reality of the Incarnate Dying God, “the mythical radiance resting on our theology.”¹⁴

Finally, once the True Myth has become clear, once the unbeliever has seen the beam of Christ piercing through our dark world, one thing still remains: we must call one another to action. You cannot truly know the thrill of flight until you jump off the cliff. To enter into the life of Christ requires the leap into the dark—into the mystery of trusting and loving Someone we cannot directly see. We must act even though we cannot yet fully know what we will be inside the light. The Christian apologist cannot make this step for the unbeliever, but we can serve as an encourager who joyfully explains, “You have been born ‘For infinite happiness… You can step out into it at any moment.’”¹⁵

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— Annie Crawford is a cultural apologist and classical educator with a Master of Arts in Cultural Apologetics from Houston Christian University. She teaches apologetics and Great Text courses for Vine Classical Community in Austin, Texas, and is co-founder of The Society for Women of Letters where she serves as Senior Fellow. Annie also writes for The Symbolic World, Salvo, Classical Academic Press, and An Unexpected Journal, where she is a founding editor and writer. Learn more at anniecrawford.net.

1. C.S. Surprised by Joy, The Inspirational Writings of C.S. Lewis (New York: Inspirational Press, 1994), 125.

2. C.S. Lewis, “Myth Become Fact,” in God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics, ed. Walter Hooper (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1970), 57.

3. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 120.

4. Lewis, “Myth Become Fact,” in God in the Dock, 57.

5. Ibid.

6. Ibid., 58.

7. Ibid.

8. C.S. Lewis, The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, Volume 1: Family Letters, 1905-1931, vol. 1, ed. Walter Hooper (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2004), 977.

9. For a further explication of this idea, read my essay, "Literary Apologetics: A Spell for the Refreshment of Spirit," at An Unexpected Journal.

10. Holly Ordway, Apologetics and the Christian Imagination: An Integrated Approach to Defending the Faith (Stubenville, Ohio: Emmaus Road Publishing, 2017), 9

11. Ibid., 12.

12. 1 Corinthians 13:12 (ESV).

13. Lewis, “Myth Become Fact,” in God in the Dock, 60.

14. Ibid., 59.

15. C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce (New York, HarperCollins, 2009), 61, Kindle.