"How do you know?" he asked.
[Warning: Spoilers for C.S. Lewis' books from The Chronicles of Narnia are included. If you have not yet read the books (or seen the movie(s)), please pick up The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and read it first.]
I recently finished C.S. Lewis' Reflections on the Psalms. Among the many things I learned was an interesting tidbit about Professor Kirke from Lewis' The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (the first of seven in The Chronicles of Narnia).
Lucy is in conflict with Edmund on this country she found (and he visited) in the wardrobe (If none of this makes sense to you and sounds interesting, please go read the book!), causing some strife in this family of four. Peter and Susan, the two oldest, approach the Professor (with whom they are staying during the London air raids) and tell him the whole story that Lucy has related.
"How do you know?" he asked, "that your sister's story is not true?"Then there's a fair amount of dialog and logic (including a shadow of the famous "liar, lunatic, lord" argument) and it is pretty clear that the Professor is siding with Lucy on the whole story.
"Oh, but—" began Susan, and then stopped. Anyone could see from the old man's face that he was perfectly serious.
"But do you really mean, Sir," said Peter, "that there could be other worlds—all over the place, just round the corner—like that?"In Reflections, we catch Lewis evaluating some other stories.
Nothing is more probable," said the Professor, taking off his spectacles and beginning to polish them, while he muttered to himself, "I wonder what they do teach them at these schools."
. . . I never regard any narrative as unhistorical simply on the ground that it includes the miraculous. Some people find the miraculous so hard to believe that they cannot imagine any reason for my acceptance of it other than a prior belief that every sentence of the Old Testament has historical or scientific truth. [. . .] The real reason why I can accept as historical a story in which a miracle occurs is that I have never found any philosophical grounds for the universal negative proposition that miracles do not happen. I have to decide on quite other grounds (if I decide at all) whether a given narrative is historical or not.Wow. Now the Professor's logic makes more sense.
One of the reasons I insist on reading (and advising others to read) the Chronicles in the order in which they were written (starting with The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, then Prince Caspian and ending with The Horse and his Boy, The Magician's Nephew and The Last Battle) rather than the chronological order (starting with The Magician's Nephew) is for the sense of mystery. We marvel with Lucy and the others at the Lantern. We are surprised by talking beasts and a magnificent lion. And we wonder why the Professor is so wise.
We find out later, of course, that one reason the Professor is so quick to believe Lucy is that he has experienced the same miracle. But approaching the book from a position of not knowing allows us to experience the wonder, the marvel and the awe as the children do their first time through the wardrobe.
"How do you know?" he asked.
