The Voyage of the Dawn Treader: Chapter 13 “The Three Sleepers”

C.S. Lewis Read-Along, Vol. 3, Issue 14

Background: What does it mean for a Christian to believe in Christ? For C.S. Lewis, this doesn’t mean a leap of blind faith. Instead, it means a careful consideration of the available evidence, but it still requires faith because confirmation can only come after trust.

Foreground: As we have seen throughout the Narnia books, there are often numerous literary influences behind the scenes of Lewis’ plot, characters and settings. But if we only spend our time analyzing those, we miss the main joy of the book.

Quote: “‘You can’t know,’ said the girl. ‘You can only believe—or not.’”

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Pauline Baynes illustration

Background: “The Three Sleepers”

Does someone have to believe without evidence to become a Christian? Is it a matter of a blind leap into the dark?

The scene with the Dawn Treader voyagers and the mysterious girl at the table seems to indicate that C.S. Lewis advocated for this type of belief. The lady invited them to eat and drink from this magical table. Edmund raises a polite objection.

The narrator says he had been “looking more and more uncomfortable for the last few minutes.” Perhaps, Edmund was recalling the time he was famously taken in by magic food offered by the White Witch in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

He tells her they’ve had several strange adventures during their voyage and have come to realize “things aren’t always as they seem.” So he directly asks her, “How are we to know you’re a friend?”

Edmund has been skeptical before but often of the wrong people. After discovering Mr. Tumnus’ cave ransacked, he questioned if he and his siblings should be following the robin into the woods. Additionally, he asked Mr. Beaver the same question he asked the girl here, “How do we know you’re a friend?”

In response, Mr. Beaver provides Lucy’s handkerchief from Mr. Tumnus. Now, the girl responds, “You can’t know. You can only believe—or not.”

Edmund can compare his two encounters with a stately lady offering him food and note significant differences. This girl does not have outward shows of power, while the Witch carried on with a giant fur coat and crown. In response to Edmund’s question, the girl simply laid the options before him, but the Witch attempted to overwhelm him with false charm. The girl has offered them all a meal from Aslan’s table. The Witch tried to bribe Edmund with sweets and set him against his siblings. The choice is to believe or not, but it is not without evidence.

In his essay “On Obstinacy in Belief” republished in The World’s Last Night and Other Essays, Lewis argues that the Christian and the scientist share a similar attitude toward belief and evidence. Both have certain beliefs they arrive at without doing the work to definitively prove that belief. “Belief, in this sense, seems to me to be assent to a proposition which we think so overwhelmingly probable that there is a psychological exclusion of doubt, though not a logical exclusion of dispute,” he writes.

In his essay “Miracles” republished in God in the Dock, he says it’s not a matter of seeing is believing. “Experience proves nothing. If a man doubts whether he is dreaming or waking, no experiment can solve his doubt, since every experiment may itself be part of the dream. Experience proves this, or that, or nothing, according to the preconceptions we bring to it.”

Edmund has his preconceptions and the evidence in front of his face, but he still must choose whether to believe this mysterious girl. J.R.R. Tolkien presented his hobbit heroes with a similar choice in The Fellowship of the Ring, as they had to decide if they should trust the dangerous-looking Strider.

Tolkien and Lewis give us examples of Christian belief. The Dawn Treader travelers and the hobbits are not being asked to believe without evidence, but they can’t truly know until they believe and act on that belief. Knowledge and confirmation only happen after belief and trust. We must evaluate all the evidence before us to determine if someone or some belief system is worthy of our trust.