The Voyage of the Dawn Treader: Chapter 14 “The Beginning of the End of the World”

C.S. Lewis Read-Along, Vol. 3, Issue 15

Background: Because of his own experiences, Lewis spent much of his adult Christian life helping people recognize the deception behind the reductionist perspective that sees things and people as only what they are made of. He wanted to help others see creation as enchanted.

Foreground: Spells can only be broken with willing participants. Lewis discovered that though he disliked church services, it was to his benefit to become a regular part of his local congregation.

Quote: “‘In our world,’ said Eustace, ‘a star is a huge ball of flaming gas.’ ‘Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is but only what it is made of.’”

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Pauline Baynes illustration

Background: “The Beginning of the End of the World”

As the Dawn Treader travelers realize they are speaking with a star, C.S. Lewis has Eustace voice the objection that may have popped into our head while hearing Ramandu talk. “In our world, a star is a huge ball of flaming gas.” As has often been the case in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Lewis places much of his younger perspective and personality in Eustace.

For much of Lewis’ early life, he was a committed secular materialist. The only things that are real are those that can be measured and quantified scientifically. His time with William Kirkpatrick cemented in Lewis that humans can reach truth through logic and reason. Our minds can discover what is true if we use them correctly.

Yet Lewis began to see a conflict between that Kirkpatrick belief and his tutor’s materialistic atheism, which Lewis adopted. If our minds are the product of random chance with no external design toward truth, how can we trust their reasoning? If our thinking is merely the firing of neurons and chemical reactions at the end of a purposeless evolutionary path that happened to result in the existence of our brains, what makes us think they won’t yield random results with no relation to truth? If humans are merely the organic matter that comprises us, why would we think we reason our way to what is true? Lewis came to see secular materialism as self-defeating.

This realization was one of the earliest steps of his conversion to Christianity. He recognized all that he loved about life was found on the side of the supernatural. The authors he most resonated with believed in God. And now, materialistic atheism couldn’t even provide the one thing it claimed to have a monopoly on—a pursuit of truth.

At this point in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Eustace has already encountered Aslan and “begun to be a different boy.” But old ways of thinking take time to discard. He has spent his life reading only “books of information.” The ramifications of a new life are discovered over a lifetime of new encounters. Eustace is still working out what it all means when he blurts out this fact he knows about stars in our world.

Ramandu calmly explains, “Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is but only what it is made of.” Because of his own experiences, Lewis spent much of his adult Christian life helping people recognize the deception behind the reductionist perspective. Things are more than simply the sum of their parts.

In his essay “Transposition” reprinted in The Weight of Glory, Lewis says those who embrace secular materialism “see all the facts but not the meaning.” In The Abolition of Man, he writes about the pointlessness of trying to go on “explaining away” forever and ever. “You cannot go on ‘seeing through’ things forever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it.”

His rejection of a reductionist mindset led Lewis to frequently praise the Medieval perspective on life. The world was enchanted for a person in the Middle Ages. Lewis talks about literature having the power to re-enchant our world. For him, reading of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth allows him to see the trees on our earth differently. Not that they become something new scientifically but that they have deeper meaning and significance beyond the matter they’re composed of.¹

Following their famous discussion about myth that ended with a stroll on Addison’s Walk, Tolkien wrote a poem “Mythopoeia,” reprinted in Tree and Leaf, featuring words from “Philomythos” (myth-lover) to “Misomythos” (myth-hater). He dedicated it to “C.S.L” and wrote, “To one who said that myths were lies and therefore worthless, even though ‘breathed through silver.’” In that poem, the Lewis character holds the view that “a star’s a star, some matter in a ball.”