Longing for Beauty in the Midst of Sorrow and Death

Joseph Loconte explores the role George MacDonald's book Phantastes played in C.S. Lewis' conversion to Christianity.  What is Phantastes about?  "Phantastes explores what at first seems to be a young man's search for feminine beauty, but turns out to be a quest for something much more profound."  The hero's quest encounters various frustrations and sufferings, and what he seems to be pursuing turns out to be not so much a destination as it is a sign pointing beyond itself to something transcendently beautiful.


As Loconte writes, Christianity was very far from Lewis' mind at the time.  But the close of World War I had disposed him to be open to something beyond his generation's commonplace thoughts about progress, patriotism, and religion.


MacDonald wasn't looking for Lewis.  Lewis wasn't looking for MacDonald.  But book and reader found one another, and in Phantastes, Lewis found something important.  In a materialist world, where the material is all there is, none of us point beyond ourselves.  But in a world of signs, the world and all that is within it point beyond themselves.  There is such a thing as false beauty.  But true beauty in this world tells the truth.  It is a sign.  It points to the author of beauty.


This isn't otherworldly and escapist.  In fact, it gave Lewis the strength to see beauty in the midst of death and darkness without ignoring evil.  Loconte writes: "In April 1918, while he was serving as a second lieutenant on the Western Front, Lewis's regiment engaged in a firefight at Riez du Vinage.  A shell exploded close by, killing his sergeant and injuring him with shrapnel in the hand, leg and chest.  Lewis was sent by train to a hospital in London.  The pleasure of the English countryside - set against the suffering and horror of war - seemed to quicken his belief in a transcendent source of natural beauty.


'"Can you imagine how I enjoyed my journey to London?"  Lewis wrote to a friend from his bed at Endsleigh Palace Hospital.  "First of all the sight and smell of the sea, that I have missed for so many long and weary months, and then the beautiful green country seen from the train...You see the conviction is gaining ground on me that after all Spirit does exist.  I fancy there is Something right outside time and place, which did not create matter, as the Christians say, but is matter's great enemy." (Loconte, Books and Culture vol 22, number 4, pg. 5)


In the midst of real sorrow and death, Lewis found his longing for beauty strengthened.  What Lewis is encountering here - what is also drenched in MacDonald's books - is what many Christians over the centuries have described as a "sacramental" understanding of the world - that it points beyond itself to the one who made it.