Prince Caspian Chapter 5: “Caspian‘s Adventure in the Mountains”

Narnia Read-Along Vol. 2, Issue 6

Pauline Baynes illustration

As we discuss Prince Caspian, you’ll find some background information about the book, C.S. Lewis, and his thoughts in the Inspiration section available to all subscribers. Paid subscribers have access to the more specific discussion in the Application section.

Inspiration of “Caspian‘s Adventure in the Mountains”

When we think of C.S. Lewis, most of us have in mind the man who described himself as a “dinosaur” in a lecture.¹ We think of the Lewis who was constantly defending old books and classic ideas, but that was post-conversion. Before he returned to his childhood faith, C.S. Lewis was a thoroughgoing modernist.

This pre-Christian Lewis dismissed everything old as irrelevant and outdated. In arguing against anything spiritual, the eventual Chair of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge University dismissed their attitudes as “medieval.” In Surprised by Joy, he explained that he “used the names of earlier periods as terms of abuse.”

At the end of Prince Caspian chapter 5 “Caspian’s Adventure in the Mountains,” Trumpkin derisively asks, “Do you believe in all those old stories?” and “Who believes in Aslan nowadays?” I can picture Lewis hearing his younger self in the skeptical dwarf’s question.

For Lewis, his secular materialism was not only being challenged by the stories he loved but also by the friends surrounding him. Owen Barfield met Lewis in 1919 while both were undergraduate students at Oxford. The two became good friends. A few years later, Barfield began to doubt materialism. This particularly troubled Lewis because he believed Barfield to be not just his intellectual equal but his superior. The more the two talked, the more Barfield stripped away Lewis’ “chronological snobbery.” In Surprised by Joy, Lewis describes this as their “Great War.”

Barfield helped Lewis recognize in himself “the uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate common to our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that account discredited.” Instead of treating calendars as if they determine morality, Barfield challenged Lewis to actually investigate why an idea is no longer accepted. Was it refuted or did it fade away based on fashion?

Contemplating this, Lewis came to see that “our own age is also ‘a period,’ and certainly has, like all periods, its own characteristic illusions. They are likeliest to lurk in those widespread assumptions which are so ingrained in the age that no one dares to attack or feels it necessary to defend them.”

In explaining Prince Caspian, Lewis said it is about a time when the “old stories about [Aslan] are beginning to be disbelieved.” Notice how Trumpkin frames his objections as temporal. He has no evidence that any of the stories of Aslan are untrue, only that those stories are “old.” They aren’t part of “nowadays.”

Once Lewis recognized this wrong tendency in his own life, he worked to help everyone else spot it as well. He exposed it through his fiction and refuted it in his non-fiction. He became a dinosaur, not like the dry bones extinct in the ground, but like the living creatures in Jurassic Park that evoke wonder and challenge your previous notions of what is true.

The modernist became an advocate for the historical. We need the past to help us see truth more clearly in the present. As Lewis wrote in “On the Reading of Old Books” in God in the Dock:

The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books. Not, of course, that there is any magic about the past. People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes. They will not flatter us in the errors we are already committing; and their own errors, being now open and palpable, will not endanger us. Two heads are better than one, not because either is infallible, but because they are unlikely to go wrong in the same direction. To be sure, the books of the future would be just as good a corrective as the books of the past, but unfortunately, we cannot get at them.

In The Four Loves, Lewis wrote, “All that is not eternal is eternally out of date.” Our standard is eternity, not modernity. Truth is not the servant of time. Many characters in Prince Caspian must learn this lesson so do many in our world.