Discover the Hidden Meaning of Narnia's Endless Winter

Today on The Sand the Great West Podcast,

we have something new and something exciting.

We are taking an article from the Ascent,

our sister company over on Substack,

a top 100 substack in faith and spirituality.

We're gonna take one of the most popular articles over there,

the hidden meaning of the endless winter of Narnia.

Is there an allegorical meaning or a hidden meaning

to the endless winter in Narnia?

It's a deep dive into CS Lewis, Dante,

and the problem of evil.

We're gonna take that article

and we're really going to explore those concepts today

in a very deep and thorough way.

We're really looking forward to sharing it with you all.

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the American Odyssey,

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So many, many good things on the docket,

but today join us for an excellent conversation

on the hidden meaning of the endless winter of Narnia.

So

Welcome to Asin, the great books podcast.

My name is Deacon Harrison Garlic.

I'm a husband, father, five,

and serve as chancellor and general counsel

for the Roman Catholic Diocese of Tulsa.

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Okay, so today we have something fun,

something new, something very good,

and I think beautiful as well.

So as you might know,

we have a sister company.

We have a sister publication called The Ascent.

So we have Ascent, The Great Books Podcast.

Here helping you read the great books

in kind of a small group setting.

But we also now have The Ascent,

which is a sub-stack that is mainly focused

on Christian spirituality,

theosis, sanctification.

It's very much entrenched in the Western canon

and the great books as well.

But really looking at how can we become more beautiful

like Christ is beautiful?

And so we published two articles a week.

On Tuesday, we have a short article that comes out

that's free for everybody.

And then on Fridays, we have kind of like a deep dive

that's for our members only,

even though there's kind of a sneak peak at the beginning

for everyone following along to the sub-stack.

So it's been wonderful.

I've launched it along with the cultureist

and also Evan Amato, they've been fantastic.

We are a top 100 sub-stack already

in faith and spirituality.

So I feel very humbled by that fact.

And so something new that we're gonna do,

which I think is gonna be really wonderful,

is that we're gonna start taking some of the top articles

on The Ascent and discussing them here

on Ascend The Great Books Podcast.

And so the first one that we're actually gonna take up

is the hidden meaning of the endless winter of Narnia.

Is there a hidden meaning, a deeper meaning

and allegorical meaning to C.S. Lewis's use of winter

of the cold in the line of which in the wardrobe.

And our thesis to kind of start off here,

is that C.S. Lewis uses the endless winter

as an analog for evil, that it's allegorical for evil.

But what does that mean?

Well, we really have to dig into it.

If we dig into what C.S. Lewis is doing here,

you realize that his insight, which is already profound,

tethers him also to a profound insight

in Dante's Inferno, who also surprisingly,

particularly for a book called The Inferno,

uses the ice and cold as an analog for evil.

So we're gonna jump into that today.

I think it's gonna be a fantastic discussion

of looking forward to discussing it with you.

So where would it begin?

Well, let's begin with just a little bit of background.

So as a lot of you know, the line of which in the wardrobe

starts off with Peter Susan Edwin in Lucy leaving London

during World War II, so think of the bombings of London

into the countryside, like a lot of children do.

And so they go to, there's a mansion held

by this kind of a centric professor and long story short.

There are Lucy's playing one day,

goes into the wardrobe and the wardrobe leads

into a magical land of Narnia.

And so eventually all the kids discover Narnia,

they go into it.

And through kind of an adventure

with some talkative beavers

and some other mythological characters,

they understand that Aslan has come.

Aslan's coming.

This is the lion figure.

But what's interesting about Narnia,

is that it's suffering under an endless winter.

It is always winter, but never Christmas.

And this has been overseen.

The antagonist here is the white witch.

And so as many of you know, Lewis plays with our expectations

and with the expectations of the children.

And so Aslan does not immediately come in

as this military victorious hero,

as he is expected to be,

because there's a gathering of armies

and the retaking of Narnia and things like this.

But rather, we see that Aslan then defeats the white witch

ultimately through self-sacrifice.

And it's actually through the death

and the resurrection of Aslan that Narnia is ultimately saved.

So this is a very famous allegory that most people know

that Aslan and the Narnia series represents

a crystallological figure.

It represents Jesus Christ.

And so as Aslan died and rose from the dead in Narnia,

so too, is that analogous or it images

the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ in our life.

And this is one of the, as a side point,

this is one of the beautiful things

of reading the chronicles of Narnia to your children.

Is that one of the real benefits of reading

the Narnia series to your children,

is that it actually habituates them to allegory.

It habituates them to a slow, patient read

that understands that narratives have meaning,

that narratives have layers.

And this is new for a child's mind,

that one thing can stand as an analog for another.

That one thing can be an image of another.

That when you read a story about Aslan dying

on the stone table and rising from the dead,

you kind of read that narrative to them

and you say does that sound like anyone else?

And you can watch their young minds

start to be habituated to allegory.

And this is honestly a tremendous service

that you can do to your children,

is to habituate them to the fact

that real narratives have strata,

that real narratives have layers.

And we have to work through these layers

if we're going to then understand the reality around us.

Because two important things have this type of strata.

One is holy scripture.

So many of you might know,

and we've talked about this both on Aslan,

the great book's podcast and on the sub-stack, The Ascent,

is that there are four senses to holy scripture.

There's the literal, there's the allegorical,

then the moral and then the anagogical.

So first we understand just what is the author's intent?

What is the literal meaning here?

What's the genre?

What's the historical setting?

This is the literal.

Then we understand the allegorical.

We understand that one thing can serve as a type of another,

that one thing can image another thing,

that manna in the desert,

we see Israel going through,

the desert on the way to the promised land,

can be an image of the blessed sacrament.

That can be an image of Christ, the bread of life,

who's come down amongst us,

who will then satisfy this hunger, as we see in John 6.

You also see, say in the Old Testament,

we get the Ark of the Covenant,

this gold box, the dwelling place of Christ on earth.

And in the New Testament,

are the early church fathers point to Mary

as the new Ark of the Covenant,

the new dwelling place of God on earth.

You also see Christ make another famous allegorical comparison

where he compares himself to Jonah,

that just like Jonah,

was three days in the belly of the whale,

so two will our Lord be three days and then rise again.

So not only is this a way to habituate a child's mind

to scripture, but also it's the way

that our Lord interpreted scripture.

So understanding how allegory works,

understanding analogues, how one thing can image another,

sometimes called typology,

or a study of types, logos, and type, a study of types.

This thing can be a type of another.

It is incredibly important for your own imagination,

but very important for the imagination of a child.

Then it's in that richness, that tilled soil,

of a literal read, along with an allegorical read,

that then we can talk about moral.

How does this apply to my life?

A lot of people who read scripture,

who don't seem to get a lot out of it,

they don't know understand how this applies to my life,

is because they're skipping from literal to moral.

And they don't do the allegorical read.

And that's where a lot of the richness comes from.

And again, your child can benefit then from Narnia,

helping them to understand the strata,

helping them to understand the allegory.

So then when they start reading scripture themselves,

they too will be accustomed to looking for the images,

looking for the layers.

Honestly, habituating us, you should habituate the child,

to the fact that good narratives, good stories, have layers.

They have maybe allegory, or at times,

they just have analogues, where one thing stands for another.

And then at the end, we get the fourth sense,

the anagogical, or do we don't use very often?

But it simply means that we're focused on the end of our life.

It's our final purpose.

So how does this thing that I'm reading in front of me?

How does this apply to my final end with God?

How is this going to help me achieve my purpose?

Because keep in mind, it's by a thing's end

that we judge that thing to be good or bad.

So for instance, if I said this was a good knife,

you would know that the knife must be sharp,

because the purpose of the knife is to cut.

And so it's by the purpose of the knife

that you can judge whether the knife is good or bad.

You can also then start the judge

whether something is good or bad for the knife.

So if it helps sharpen the knife,

if it helps strengthen the knife,

then it's good for the knife.

If it makes it brittle, if it makes it dull,

then it's bad for the knife.

The good things we call virtues.

The bad things we call vices.

And so the same thing plays for humanity.

In God, we understand what our final end is.

And therefore we can judge what a good or bad human is.

We can also judge then what is good or bad for that human.

The anagogical read is rooted in this.

Does this help me achieve my final end with God?

And so these are the four senses of Scripture,

which is very much rooted and anchored

in a good understanding of the allegorical.

And if you read Narnia to your children,

if you read The Chronicles of Narnia,

it helps your mind expand and stretch

and kind of understand, I think,

a thicker understanding of reality

that is actually applicable not only to Scripture,

but the second thing is that it's actually

applicable to reality itself.

The medieval Christians read reality

according to the four senses

that everything in this world around us

actually images a spiritual reality

that the material images the immaterial.

So what would be an example of this?

We see this with St. Paul.

St. Paul tells us not that we call God Father

because he's like the earthly fathers that we see,

but rather that we call the earthly fathers father

because they are like God.

And that's a really important distinction

because when we call the earthly fathers father,

because of God, what that means is that the earthly fathers,

the fathers in a family are actually the metaphor.

They are the image of God.

As opposed to if you said that we call God Father

because of the earthly fathers,

then God being the father is the metaphor.

It depends on which way do you think this is going?

Is the material imaging the immaterial?

Or does the immaterial image the material?

And this is something that C.S. Lewis

is profoundly sensitive to

because for those who know,

C.S. Lewis has deep platonic inclinations

and his own writings and his own beliefs.

Also being a medieval scholar.

If you want to see a wonderful text on his medieval mind,

check out the discarded image.

C.S. Lewis book that's not discussed nearly enough.

And so a lot of this imagery is baked then into Narnia.

And if you can understand the allegorical,

you'll be a better reader of scripture

and you'll actually be a better reader of reality itself

and how reality is structured

according to the divine authorship of God.

Now that's Aslan.

That's what Aslan introduces to

because he's such a clear analog.

He's such a clear allegory for Jesus Christ.

But again, a wonderful introduction for children.

But our question is,

what is C.S. Lewis then doing with the endless winter?

That's an analog that's not discussed as much.

And our thesis is is that it stands for evil.

So how do we see that work?

Okay, well, the first question we have to ask ourselves

is what is evil?

So one thing you have to understand

that's really helped me in my own kind of intellectual life

is that your mind will move from grammar to logic to rhetoric.

And what does that mean?

It means that you have to understand terms

before you can actually logically think about them

and apply them.

And then only then, once you know the terms

and you've applied the terms,

can you successfully actually talk about them?

Now, here's our problem.

Today, we typically skip the grammar stage,

which means we don't define our terms.

And we kind of do something that seems like logic,

but we're really just focused on the rhetoric.

We just like to talk at people and share what we think

without really actually telling the soil,

without the difficulties of actually preparing our minds

for good intellectual thought.

So if we're going to take up this question

of what is the meaning of the endless winter

and our thesis that it stands for evil,

then let us actually work on our grammar

and take up the question of what is evil?

Because we don't want to equivocate.

Aristotle talks about equivocation.

This is where two people come together

to discuss something, say like evil,

but both actually have different grammar.

They have different definitions of what that word means.

If you want an example of this,

basically check out any social media argument

you've ever witnessed online,

is that people bring different definitions to an argument

and they just talk past one another.

So let's look at then what is evil?

So there's something in Christianity called theodicy.

So not theodicy as by Homer, the epic poem,

but theodicy, T-H-E-O-D-I-C-Y, theodicy.

And this is the fancy theological term

for the problem of evil.

Now, why do we call this the problem of evil?

Well, one of the reasons is how we view God as Christians.

It kind of goes something like this.

God is good.

Everything that God created is good, but evil exists.

So therefore, where did evil actually come from?

You see, a lot of religions take up this problem

by creating a certain duality.

So they say, okay, well, there's a good God or a good force,

and then there's a bad God in a bad force.

And these things are basically, they're competitive.

They're equal opposites to one another.

And life is really about this balance

or life is about trying to move towards the good force

away from the bad force.

And this makes sense on its face and many different ways

because we see that evil does exist.

But this is not a claim that Christianity makes.

Christianity makes a very unique claim

that there's only one God.

And that God is good.

And everything that God created is also good.

And that evil, and this is very key, evil is not

an equal opposite to the good.

And we see this, it's shown to us.

We don't have like maybe the philosophy, the theology,

but we see this in narrative in the Old Testament

where we have God.

But then his quote unquote opposite is a creature.

It's creator to creature.

We have God, but then we have Satan,

just a fallen angel who in no way shape or form

has the same power, the same majesty,

the same omnipotence as God does.

It's a creator to creature relationship,

not a relationship of equals.

And so one of the images, one of the narratives

that we receive in the Old Testament

is that there is no equal opposite evil to God.

God is simply good.

Everything he creates is good.

Yet evil exists and that's the problem.

And this problem of evil actually raises

many other problems as well.

So for instance, it's not something that evil exists,

but that evil has an effect upon us.

So the good God allows his good creation to suffer evil.

And this might be maybe somewhat tolerable

if it was only the adults that suffered

because we've all kind of committed evil as well.

So maybe there's a justice to it.

But then we see that children suffer.

We see that the unborn suffer.

We see that the innocent suffer.

How can a good God allow these things?

One of the best depictions of this, I think, in literature

is the brother's care, the brother's care

and moths off by Dotski Eski.

Why?

Because in that text, if you've read it,

you have Ivan, you have Alliostia.

Ivan is giving these examples not for why God doesn't exist,

but for why God is not good.

And he gives the string of horrendous examples

of children suffering abuse, which I've heard

are not just simply tied into the fictional narrative

of the brother's care, but rather these were actually

real examples that Dotski Eski had brought into

his narrative or adapted into the story.

And so he tells these gut-wrenching stories

of these little children suffering abuse

and crying out for God to save them.

And he does not, and they die in these terrible ways.

And so one thing here is we simply scratch the surface

of the problem of evil, the problem of theodicy,

is that this isn't reducible to some kind

of sterile, academic conversation.

But rather, this is something that we all suffer through.

We have loved ones that suffer through.

And a lot of times, it seems profoundly unjust.

How could a good God allow this?

And so this opens us up to all kinds of questions.

What is evil?

Why do good people suffer?

Why does God permit this, et cetera?

And so what we need to do is work on our grammar.

We need to work on what do we mean by evil?

And this is what we turn to C.S. Lewis

and we turn to Dante to try and teach us

as these two great masters of Christianity.

What then is evil?

And they don't necessarily tell us, but they show us.

And they show us through the analog of the cold of winter,

of ice.

OK, so then what is evil?

What is our working definition?

If we're going to work on our grammar,

if we're going to turn to C.S. Lewis,

if we're going to turn to Dante, then what is evil?

What's our grammar?

What's our working definition here?

We're following St. Augustine, who then

is also following kind of the neoplatonists.

We see that evil is unreal.

Evil is not a real thing.

And you might push back and say, well, that can't be true.

Because we just talked about evil.

It's something I can name.

It's something that I see.

The suffering, I see this corruption.

Evil has to be real.

I can name all these evil people, all these evil deeds.

So when we talk about evil not being real,

we kind of talk about it in the same way

like a whole in the ground is not real.

Certainly you can say, well, isn't that a whole in the ground?

Can I talk about it?

I can see it, et cetera.

Yeah, sure you can.

But the whole itself is not real.

It's a lack of something.

It's a privation.

It's an absence of something else.

So for instance, kind of think of it this way,

you can't have the whole in the ground without the ground.

You have to have something to have a whole in it.

So the whole is only real in so far

as the other thing does not exist.

And this is, I think, a really good picture then

of what we think of as a relationship between good and evil.

That God is good and everything that He creates is good.

Evil then is not the equal opposite of good.

Evil is like the whole in the ground.

Evil is a corruption.

It's a privation.

It's a lack of something.

In other words, you can't really have something

that is pure evil, just like you can't

to simply have a whole in the ground or a whole.

It's like, hey, look, here is this whole.

It hasn't worked.

It has to be a whole in something else.

Evil is the exact same way.

Another analogy is a lot of people point to light and dark.

That the darkness is really just an absence of light.

And that is actually how it's measured.

It's light that is the real thing.

I can have a flashlight.

The light can make the light come.

The darkness is not its equal opposite.

I can't have some mechanism that shines darkness out.

They're not equal opposites.

The darkness is simply an absence of light.

And so just as the darkness is an absence of light,

so too is evil an absence of the good.

Or just like the whole is an absence of the ground,

so too is evil an absence of the good.

And therefore what that does is that we can see it

as something that is uncreated.

It's not something that God created,

but rather it's a corruption, a privation

of something that God created.

And this is a good, this is like,

so if you're looking for your kind of Catholic definition

of this, St. Tom's Quinus, again following St. Augustine,

who's been following the Neoplatonists,

we'll talk about that evil is a privation of the good.

That's our kind of working definition.

It's a privation of the good.

And again, you can talk about this like thick,

philosophical theological grammar,

but we see it.

We see the images of it.

We see the narrative.

Holy Scripture a lot of times shows us the answer.

It doesn't tell us the answer.

And so go back to the Satan example.

Satan is fundamentally good.

Satan is a creature of God,

and God created him good.

But ultimately he chose to rebel.

And therefore he becomes a corruption of himself.

So one thing to keep in mind is a simple theological principle

that might help you is that the corruption of the best

is always the worst.

And so Satan, Lucifer before his fall

was the highest of all the creatures in creation.

But in that he suffers from pride and then he falls

and he becomes the worst creature in all of creation.

And so the same thing too, like for instance,

your intellect is the highest faculty in your soul.

And so when you corrupt your intellect,

you corrupt the image of God in you.

You act in some of the worst possible ways

because you're using your highest faculty

what's highest in you in the worst possible way.

But what's really important here, I think, for our purposes

is that Satan actually shows us I think

a few fundamental principles that we need to keep in mind

when we talk about evil.

So one is that everything that God created is good

and that evil is a privation.

And what that means is if we stop and kind of think about it,

what that means is being existing

is actually convertible with goodness.

Or in other words, to the degree that something exists,

it is also good because existence itself, being itself

is good because it is authored by a good God

who is goodness itself.

And so Christianity makes this very unique claim

that goodness and being are actually convertible.

And what evil is then is a privation, a corruption.

So in really, in certain ways, the more evil you become,

something becomes, the less you actually exist,

you're participating in unreality.

You're like a being of light that is slowly

being corrupted into a shadow.

You're like the ground that is slowly giving way to a collapse,

to an abyss, to a hole in the middle of it.

To the degree that you embrace evil

is the degree that you no longer exist.

Evil is an unreality.

So that's one of the first examples or principles

that I think we can pull from Satan.

The second one, too, is simply the origin of evil.

So if evil doesn't exist and God didn't create evil,

where does it come from?

You can say it's a privation, you can say it's a corruption,

but where does it actually come from?

Well, it actually comes from free will.

As we saw with Satan, as we saw with Adam and Eve,

it comes with the capacity to choose,

that we can actually choose something other than the good.

In one distinction I do want to make here,

is a lot of times when we hear people say

that free will is the origin of evil,

they usually say something along the lines of like,

well, if we were truly going to love,

if God wanted us to love him back,

then we actually had to have free will.

And that's correct.

But then they'll usually say something like,

so we had to have the capacity to choose evil.

And so I want to push back on that just a little bit,

because God would not give us something

that is actually designed to ever choose evil,

because that's not what he is.

Everything he gives us is for the good.

And this is one of those things where again,

we have to recapture our Christian grammar,

because our grammar has been corrupted by modernity.

One of the very dangerous things about the modern age,

is that it uses our ancient Christian terms,

but in a new way.

And again, your mind works from grammar to logic to rhetoric.

So when they change the definitions of terms,

which think right now of all the terms in our culture,

that they're constantly trying to change the definitions of,

if they can change the grammar, they know,

they automatically change your logic,

and then your rhetoric.

So part of you having to purify and keep whole

and protect your Christian imagination,

is to protect your grammar,

to actually know what words mean,

and to actually signify a true reality.

And so freedom, this liberty that you were given by God,

it's not what the world tells you.

The world tells you that freedom is kind of the capacity

to satiate desire.

It's a plurality of choice to satiate your desires

that the more choices you have,

good or bad, the more free you are.

That's not freedom.

Freedom was never designed to choose between good or evil.

Freedom given to you by God was actually given to you

to choose amongst the goods.

It was given to you as an intellectual creature

that can reflect upon your acts as acts,

to be able to choose amongst many different goods,

because goods exist in a hierarchy.

And not all decisions are between good and evil.

Most of the decisions that you make every single day

are actually just between different types of goods.

What should I be doing now?

Which good is more important?

How should I spend my time?

We navigate a hierarchy of goods as an intellectual creature

according to our freedom.

The capacity to choose evil and the choosing of evil

is always a deep corruption of freedom and liberty.

It is never a true exercise of one's liberty to choose evil.

So just as a side note, another word in your grammar

that you're going to have to reclaim from the modern age

is liberty.

That is, the capacity to choose amongst goods,

it is not a plurality of options to satiate desires,

whether those options are good or bad.

And so up to this point, we see that there's maybe

three principles or three truths that we're

trying to hold together.

One is that evil is a privation of the good.

Two, that the origin of evil is the misuse

or the corruption of freedom.

And three, this interesting claim that Christianity

makes that goodness and being are convertible.

To the degree that something exists, it is also good.

And every time you choose evil,

anytime anything participates in evil,

you're participating in an unreality.

OK, so if that's our working definition of evil,

and the kind of the general effects

that we need to understand around this conversation,

then how does C.S. Lewis and Dante show us this truth?

How do they invite us into a deeper understanding?

OK, so let's return to C.S. Lewis.

How does he show us this lesson?

Arthesis is that the cold is an analog for evil.

So according to what we know now about the definition

of evil, how does this play out?

Well, this endless winter, this perpetual winter that

represents the evil that's overcome Narnia,

is another wonderful analog for evil

because it presents the cold as an absence of heat.

So just like the darkness is an absence of light,

or the whole is the absence of the ground.

So too is the cold and absence of heat.

It's another natural analog for evil.

And what's really interesting about C.S. Lewis using cold

as an analog for evil is that it actually

has a whole nother layer to it that we might not see exactly

in the darkness to the light or the whole to the ground.

And it's this, is that your soul in Latin

is called an anima, this animus, this anima, which

is your soul.

And this is where we get a lot of words in English

like an animal animation to be animated.

Things that move have a soul.

There's movement there, movement indicates life.

It's why things that are inanimate,

they have no anima, are things that don't move,

like your desk or your TV or things like this.

And we see that God, then, is the spirit of life.

And we always have these pictures of God as love.

And so there's a warmth there.

There's something then that as we draw closer to God,

we're on fire.

Think about the seraphim that are flying

around the third of God, singing holy, holy, holy.

They're the burning ones.

They're on fire.

The closer you get to God, the more heat there is,

the more warmth there is.

Because he's truly goodness itself.

He's love itself.

So the more you draw away from him, the colder you become.

But with that coldness also comes death.

You start to have a cessation of your animation.

So the further you draw away from God,

the less movement there actually is.

And this is, I think, a picture of why the cold

is actually really excellent analog for evil,

because it not only has the privation aspect,

but it has the cessation aspect as well,

that you start to slow down as you become more and more cold.

Until eventually, you would simply just be frozen

and stop moving.

And what's really interesting is,

is that C.S. Lewis incorporates that aspect

in the chronicles of Narnia as well,

because the white witch, this kind of satanic figure

in this allegory, what's her main or super power, if you will.

She turns you to stone.

It's a complete cessation of your life.

Evil comes in and the movement completely stops.

The anima, the soul, that which actually animates you,

is frozen.

And so C.S. Lewis presents us that as this is like the zenith

of this evil, that's a complete cessation of life.

Now, notice how he continues this allegory,

because how do all the little animals,

all the mythological creatures, et cetera?

How then do they get restored to life?

Well, Aslan comes, the Jesus figure,

and he breathes on them.

And this is a beautiful passage.

You could say it has certain illusions to Genesis,

God breathed into Adam, and he has life.

I would also think, though, of John's Pentecost.

So you have the Pentecost in Acts,

which most people think of, the tongues of fire

on top of their head,

they're waiting for the Holy Spirit to come down, et cetera.

A lot of people skip over John's Pentecost,

and this is where the risen Lord

breathes the Holy Spirit directly into his apostles.

And what's very fascinating about that passage

is that it is intimately tied to the forgiveness of sins.

And he tells his apostles that those sins

which you retain are retained,

and those sins which you forgive are forgiven.

And so if you think about this,

particularly in a Catholic context,

there's two types of sin.

There's venial, these small mistakes

that we make throughout the day,

but there's also mortal.

And the mortal sins are called mortal

because they cut off the life of God in you.

They cut you off from grace.

Grace, again, working on grammar,

is the divine life when we participate

in the divine life of God.

But as John tells us,

we have these venial sins or we have mortal sins.

And so it's just really interesting

that in John's Gospel,

Christ breathing the Holy Spirit on his disciples

is tethered then to the forgiveness of sins.

The capacity to breathe life back in to Christians

and bring them back into the fold,

even if they have committed a mortal sin

and cut themselves off from the divine life.

And so we get a really interesting kind of image

of that in Narnia,

in which the mythological creatures,

say like Mr. Tumnus,

have been turned to stone by evil.

And it's only through the breath of Aslan

that they are actually resurrected,

that the soul, the anima,

continues then to animate them.

A really beautiful picture of Christ breathing life

back into a soul that has suffered a complete cessation

because of the effects of evil.

So I think that C.S. Lewis gives us

many, many wonderful pictures and images

in the chronicles of Narnia

to kind of discuss what then is evil

as kind of a comparison to see this

in another kind of poetic context.

Is this is also always a huge surprise

to first time readers of the Inferno.

First off, the book is called The Inferno.

It's by Dante Allegheri,

Dante the Poets,

the first canticle of the divine comedy.

The book's called The Inferno and it's about hell.

And when you get to the very pit of hell,

you're probably expecting a giant Inferno,

the lake of fire and the whole nine yards,

but what you get is a frozen lake of ice.

And as they go deeper into that ninth circle,

the souls are frozen more and more into the ice

until finally when they get into the deepest, deepest pit of hell,

the souls Dante says are like straw frozen in ice.

Like think about straw that was lying on a lake

and a lake has frozen.

And you just see the straw every which way

frozen in the ice, absolutely no movement.

That is what the damned are like

in the frozen pit of hell at the bottom of the ninth circle.

They are completely frozen.

Now, Dante presents this

because Dante also knows that God is love.

That God is the love that moves the cosmos.

He is what brings motion to everything else.

You know what's fascinating about this?

Is that even the pagans started to understand this.

And Aristotle's metaphysics,

Aristotle has to answer the question

of how does the unmoved mover, who we call God?

How does the unmoved mover move all things?

If the unmoved mover does not move.

It's a good question.

How does God, as the unmoved mover, nothing moves him,

and God has no motion because motion has potential.

And if you have potential, that means that you weren't perfect

because you can have change.

Think of it this way.

If I said, hey, here's the perfect stake.

And then I said, well, wait, stop.

And then I sprinkled some salt on top.

What's the problem with that?

Well, it must not have been perfect

because if it was perfect, you wouldn't change it.

And that's what perfection actually means.

It means that you've fully actualized your potential.

There's no more potential for you to actualize

because you are absolutely perfect.

This is why God can also be called pure act.

And so Dante knows then that God has no motion.

And so Aristotle, even a pagan then,

has to answer this question.

How does the unmoved mover move all things?

And the cosmos.

If the unmoved mover does not move,

and you know what the answer is, even for Aristotle,

the answer is love.

The answer for him is eros, the natural love,

all things that exist have a natural eros,

an erotic appetite in the best sense of that word.

They have a desire to return and satiate into God.

They have a desire to play out the path, the teleology

that God has given them, and return back to Him.

In Catholicism, we talk about this as the exetuce,

ready-toos, the creation exits from God

and then yearns to return to Him.

And that desire to return back to Him is eros.

It is that natural love in you.

Dante knows this very well,

even though he's not writing in the Greek,

he knows this concept incredibly well.

And so he writes then that it is God.

God is the love that moves the sun and stars.

He understands that God is then this motion

throughout the entire universe, that he is the source of it,

even though he himself does not move.

Everything desires to return to him.

So God is always presented then as where the motion comes from,

where the heat is, the fire, the warmth, the love.

So the farthest you get away from that will be cold.

There won't be any motion.

There'll be frozen.

And this is the brilliance of Dante's picture,

is that at that height of heaven is then this fiery love

that moves all things.

And the farthest away that you can get from Him

is the pit of hell and it's frozen solid.

And it's actually the wings of Satan

who's trapped in the center of the earth.

It's actually the wings of Satan flapping

that causes this freezing wind throughout the pit of hell.

And so all those souls then that mimicked Satan in their life

because at the bottom of hell,

particularly in the ninth circle, are traders.

They're the treacherous.

They had a malicious, fraudulent sin in their lives.

They betrayed those closest to them,

whether it was family or their country

or those who took them into hospitality, their hosts,

or their benefactors, like Judas betraying our Lord

or Brutus and Cassius betraying Caesar.

These are the treacherous.

It's ironic then that they who mimic to Satan

then are frozen in the ice due to Satan's wings.

And so Dante, just like C.S. Lewis,

actually invites you to very deep pedagogy

into what is evil and what is its relationship to the good.

And again, they don't really tell you these things.

They show you to them.

They give you an image of that Christian wisdom

in trying to navigate a really pertinent question

for your life.

What is evil?

And that if you start to grasp this question,

you can then start to understand,

I think more difficult questions about,

why do people suffer?

How do I handle suffering in my life?

Why would a good God allow me to suffer?

Those deeper conversations start here

with a good grammar about what is evil.

And if you want to understand whether you know this well or not,

you can look at the endless winter of C.S. Lewis

and you can look at the frozen pit of Dante's and Ferno.

So just in recap, what are the things,

a few things that we've learned today?

We've learned that evil is the privation of the good,

that evil is an unreality.

We've also learned that the origin of evil

is a misuse of our freedom.

But that freedom, when we use that term,

it does not mean your capacity to choose between good and evil.

It does not mean your capacity to satiate your desires

by how many choices you have.

It means your capacity to choose amongst goods.

That's why it was given to you.

In three, we see the interesting claim

that because God is good and God only created good things,

that being and goodness are actually

convertible with one another.

And to the degree that you embrace evil,

you embrace unreality, you cease to exist.

That creature of light becomes a creature of shadow.

You start to corrupt like having a hole in the ground.

You start to enter into a certain unreality and absence

because you're not embracing what is truly real,

what is true, good and beautiful.

So these are the lessons that I think we have to learn

from C.S. Lewis and Dante.

And these are the lessons that we take up

on the Ascent, the Substack twice a week.

So if you enjoyed this conversation,

let me go check us out on the Ascent on Substack

and we'll see our two articles on Christian spirituality

per week.

Here on Ascent, the right book's podcast,

if you're new to this podcast,

you're actually coming to this over from the Ascent side.

Welcome, we read the great books together

where weekly podcasts, sometimes we do topical things

like this.

Next week, we're actually going to be looking

at another article on the Ascent.

We're going to look at the spiritual harm of light.

So we're actually going to return to Dante, the Master.

We're going to return to the very structure of hell.

And look at one of, I think, the most difficult questions

about Dante's hell, the order in which he structures it.

Why does he place certain sins lower than other ones?

And if we can kind of start to scratch the surface

and answering that question, we'll

start to really understand the spiritual harm of light.

So we're going to take that up next week.

And again, we're preparing to read Homer's Odyssey

together before the movie comes out.

So while the 12 week study of Homer's Odyssey,

so if you want to join us for that,

go check out the greatbookspodcast.com for our reading

schedule.

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Thank you.