Category: C.S. Lewis

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What is the Most Forgotten Language According to C.S. Lewis?

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What is the most forgotten language? In C.S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy, the original universal language spoken by all rational beings is called Old Solar, or Hlab-Eribol-ef-Cordi.

It is not a human language — it is primordial speech shared across all the planets except the Earth, Thulcandra. Ransom explains:

“That original speech was lost on Thulcandra, our own world, when our whole tragedy took place. No human language now known in the world is descended from it.” — Perelandra

What is Hlab-Eribol-ef-Cordi? Lewis describes it as an ancient, pre-Fall tongue shared by angels (eldila) and rational beings. It is highly musical, highly inflected, and deeply meaningful.

How did the pre-Fall language sound? On the Earth, we have lost that unified speech. None of our languages descend from it directly. In Lewis’s imagery, the pre-Fall language was Solar — a speech originating from the Sun, as he suggests in his poem “The Birth of Language.”

In that poem, every word of the original language is infused with the careering Fires of the Sun — the Divine Logos — echoing the primordial Word: “Let there be…” Each word brings forth the reality it names. Can we glimpse that language today? Lewis suggest that the only power that can resurrect something of that essential speech is “true verse.”

Why? Because only in poetry do we return to the Divine poeisis — the primordial Speech that created the worlds. Lewis says:

Yet if true verse but lift the curse, they [words] feel in dreams their native Sun.

Every time we strike a true metaphor, words momentarily “dream” of their home — the Sun. On this side of the Fall, the only way to hear the Solar Speech is through mind-shifting poetry, the kind that lifts language back toward its unfallen state. C.S. Lewis hints at this in That Hideous Strength when he describes the descent of Mercury:

“This was Language herself, as she first sprang at Maleldil’s bidding out of the molten quicksilver of the star called Mercury on Earth.”

For Tolkien, the most powerful metaphor for Divine Speech is… water. Water allows us to hear the Old Solar as nothing else under the sun:

“And it is said by the Eldar that in water there lives yet the echo of the Music of the Ainur more than in any substance else that is in this Earth; and many of the Children of Ilúvatar hearken still unsated to the voices of the Sea, and yet know not for what they listen.” — The Silmarillion, Ainulindalë

What do we listen to when we hearken, unsated, to the pattering of rain on the windowsill? We attune to the essential speech that created the worlds. We lean into the faint resonance of the Music of Ilúvatar condensed into matter. For it is said that Ulmo — the Ainu through whose thought and song Ilúvatar shaped the waters of Arda— was “most deeply instructed by Ilúvatar in music.”

“Now to water had that Ainu, whom the Elves call Ulmo, turned his thought; and of all most deeply was he instructed by Ilúvatar in music.” — The Silmarillion, Ainulindalë

Among the Ainur, Ulmo was the one whom Ilúvatar instructed most deeply in music, and therefore in water the echo of that Music lives more than in any substance else that is in this Earth. This could be the reason why the Nazgûl and other evil creatures in Middle-earth hate and fear water — it rings with the song of Ulmo.

We all long to hear Old Solar because it is true speech — saturated with the Music of Creation from which our being arose. Though this language has long been forgotten on Earth, its life-giving presence still haunts us — in poetic utterance, in moments of heightened perception, and most vividly in the contemplation of water, which embodies that primal Speech as nothing else under the sun.

When we listen to the sound of water, we do not know for what we listen, yet we listen for it all the same — for in it we hear a fading echo of the Speech that uttered the world into existence.

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Does Technology Always Mean Progress? The High Cost of Making Things Cheap

Does technology always mean progress? Recently, YouTube served me a video by Julia McCoy titled “AI Just Killed Video Production,” introducing Dzine AI — a new “revolutionary” tool that has, as she claims, collapsed the entire video production industry into a 60-second workflow.

It promises to replace the costly process of traditional video production — hiring a voice actor, an animator, and a video editor — with a $25-per-month subscription.
Surprisingly, the show’s host isn’t Julia herself but her AI clone, generated with Dzine AI. The real Julia appears only at the end.

You can take any image, any character, any style, and make it speak your exact words with perfect lip sync. Bottom line? Cut your costs. Cut your time. Maximize your profit.

When I watched this, a humorous quote from Danny Devito popped up in my mind:

“Artists must suffer for their art. That’s why it’s called painting.”

If you tell an artist that true art can be created without pain, they will cringe. It’s impossible. As Viktor Frankl said, “That which gives light must endure burning.”

Can you imagine Andrei Tarkovsky creating his masterpieces with Dzine AI? For him, the obvious question would be: Why? Why cut costs if the only way to create something worthy in this world is to bear the costs of its creation?

We must experience burning in order to give light. Epictetus revealed the same conundrum:

“No great thing is created suddenly, any more than a bunch of grapes or a fig. If you tell me that you desire a fig, I answer that there must be time. Let it first blossom, then bear fruit, then ripen.”

The joy of art is the joy of being pregnant with whatever you are bringing to life — for nine long months. To cut time short is to give stillbirth. That’s why so much modern art feels dead: it has been created too quickly, and too cheaply.

Great art must cost. When Gaudí was asked how long it would take to build Sagrada Familia, he answered: “My customer is not in a hurry.” He began working on it in 1882, and it’s still unfinished. Just like we are unfinished. The only reason to work on something is because it works on you.

Gaudí believed that as he worked on his temple, his temple worked on him. Ultimately, the ONLY reason to create is to be created. Creators create to be created — to come alive. All a creator wants is the experience of being made.

To delegate the creative process to AI is to miss out on the joy of mothering God into the world. We don’t want the pains of bearing the sacred in our womb — yet what is created cheaply will always feel cheap.

“What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value.” — Thomas Paine

The ultimate question is: how much of our joy are we willing to delegate? C.S. Lewis famously noted:

“We all want progress. But progress means getting nearer to the place where you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turning then to go forward does not get you any nearer. … In that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man.” — Mere Christianity

Are we any nearer to our goal — the experience of joy — when we refuse to take the pains of building our temple? Modern technology does not make us happy; it gives us hype. It promises progress but delivers regress — for true progress means moving closer to our goal, not farther away from it.

When it comes to joy, cheap and fast are regress. If we desire a fig, we must give it time. Joy is a fruit — the fruit of being made through the work of our hands.
When we bear the cost, we create something of value; when we chase what is cheap and fast, we are slowly being unmade.

He who turns back soonest is the most progressive man.

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What is True Literacy?

What is true literacy? For the ancients, writing was never something abstract; it was always tangible — engraved in living matter like bark, wood, clay, or stone.

They saw writings in the very phenomena of the world. The idea of using letters to record thought arose from observing the writings already “engraved” in creation. All things are letters — messages inscribed by the divine hand. They contain invisible script.

Interestingly, the word book is etymologically rooted in the Proto-Germanic bōk, which in turn derives from the Proto-Indo-European bhāg(ó) or bhōg, which means beech tree.

In essence, a book is a tree. Why such an association? Is it because the first writing tablets in Europe were made from thin slices of beechwood? Or it is because the ancients intuited a spiritual kinship between the book and the tree?

When you see a message etched into matter, you begin to associate the matter with the message — the visible with the invisible, the word with the wood that bears it.

The entire concept of literacy was born from reading the “letters” written upon every part of the universe. You see divine letters in a beech tree, and the letters become the beech tree.

The Russian word for beech tree (бук) sounds like the English “book.” The etymology of this word is, surprisingly, similar to the English book.

Moreover, the Russian word for letter — буква — is etymologically related to бук, the beech tree. Letters, writings, and books are all trees. And books, like trees, have leaves — leaves that tell our story.

In Tolkien’s Leaf by Niggle, Niggle the painter spent his life working on a single leaf. That leaf was the story of his life; it embodied his life. Little did he know that somewhere there was a Tree — and his leaf was part of it. The story of his life literally rustled in the leaves of an invisible Tree. One day, beyond death, Niggle finally saw it — his Tree.

While he worked on his leaf — his story — that story was quietly becoming a Tree. Every brushstroke, every hesitation, every inspiration was mysteriously linked to the leaves of his own Tree — the Book of His Life. We all have such Trees — our stories whispering in the unseen forest of heaven. Whether written in a book or not, the leaves of our lives already rustle on an invisible Tree that we shall one day behold.

To live in the world means to walk upon letters. Letters are everywhere, whether we notice them or not. Every stone bears its Ten Commandments — whether we can read them or not. Every beech tree is etched with the message of the Ultimate Mystery. It cries: “Under me!”

In The Silver Chair, Jill and Eustace came to a wall of rock where, cut in great letters, were the words UNDER ME. It was a sign — a message of Aslan clad in stone — calling them, as every letter of the world still calls us, to look beneath the surface and find that which lives under the visible.

As the Apostle Paul said to the Corinthians:

“You yourselves are our letter, written on our hearts, known and read by everyone.” — 2 Corinthians 3:2-3

We are letters. We are walking books — and walking trees. We embody a message. We are beech trees etched with divine inscriptions. Our leaves tell a story — our story. Our stories wave and rustle in the wind of the Spirit, who keeps writing His tale upon us.

When we look into one another’s eyes, we are reading — and being read. People are books, and books are trees. In every gaze, we hear the whispering leaves of the Book of Life.

Scripture and Nature are not two separate revelations; they are one. Nature is Scripture written in living matter. Just look underneath — and you will see a book of divine letters unfolding before our eyes, where every tree, every face, every breath becomes divine Speech.

He looked up and said, “I see people; they look like trees walking around.” — Mark 8:24

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What is the Problem with Ideologies?

What is the problem with ideologies? Alexey Losev, an early 20th-century Russian philosopher, philologist, and culturologist, was one of the few Orthodox intellectuals who openly criticized Marxism as a modern myth — and managed to survive Stalin’s era without being executed. He was arrested in 1930 and sentenced to ten years of hard labor at the Belomor Canal camp.

In The Dialectics of Myth, Losev exposed the glaring inconsistency in the Bolsheviks’ view of myth and religion. They mocked ancient mythological and religious consciousness as primitive, yet relied heavily on mythological and religious symbols for their own purposes.

To advance their rhetoric in the 1920s, they referred to the counter-revolution as the many-headed Hydra. They called themselves Promethean heroes bringing enlightenment — science, progress, industry — to the masses, in defiance of “divine” or bourgeois authority.

In monumental Soviet art, giant workers, farmers, and soldiers embodied the Titans, while Tsarism, religion, and Western powers were personified as the “dragon.” Lenin’s Mausoleum, too, drew inspiration from ancient monumental tomb architecture, particularly the Egyptian pyramids.

The examples could go on. Losev was despised mostly for making one point unmistakably clear: ideologies cannot exist without myth. Even when they reject myth and religion as primitive or obsolete, they immediately create new myths to replace them. They ridicule other people’s myths, yet remain blind to the ones they are constructing themselves.

Ideologies need myth as they need air. Their power is drawn from it — and they begin to crumble when their myth grows weak. By the beginning of the 20th century, the Russian Orthodox myth had become very weak. As Nikolai Berdyaev writes in The Truth of Orthodoxy:

“Its external weakness and lack of manifestation, its deficiency of outward activity and realization, have been evident to all.”

The Marxists did not come armed with rational arguments; they came with a well-constructed myth. Arguments do not persuade — myths do.

The utopian myth of “We will build a bright future on this earth” replaced the fading myth of “The Kingdom of God after death.”

If you watch old Soviet films capturing the enthusiasm and fervor of the 1920s, you can still feel the pulse of that mythic energy. Wars are never won with weapons; they are won with myths. The more deeply a nation believes in the truth of its own myth, the more righteous it feels in its mission to prove to others that their myth is false.

Where does the power of myth come from? J.R.R. Tolkien writes:

“We have come from God, and inevitably the myths woven by us, though they contain error, will also reflect a splintered fragment of the true light.”

Marxists’ myths are not all wrong. They contain error, but they also reflect a splintered fragment of the true light. That’s why myths are so appealing! That’s why ideologies need them as air. Every ideology — or rather, idolatry — rests on a half-truth, sometimes even an eighty-percent truth. The danger lies not in falsehood, but in mistaking a fragment for the whole.

The moment we recognize our ideology as myth, we cease to believe in it absolutely. It no longer claims the totality of our lives. We don’t have to reject it, but we must fulfill it — bring it to completion. Every partial narrative must be carried toward wholeness. If we reject one, we will instantly create another. When we renounce one idol, we instinctively bow before its opposite.

Healing doesn’t come through rejection but through transcendence — through seeing the partial in light of the Whole. When we look through our idol — our ideology — we begin to recognize it as a glimpse, a splintered fragment of the true light.

Idols thrive on opposition. They grow stronger when attacked, but they cannot endure being seen through. When we look through them “as through a glass, darkly,” they lose their power and become nothing but good dreams. As C.S. Lewis said in Mere Christianity:

“God sent the human race what I call good dreams: I mean those queer stories scattered all through the heathen religions about a god who dies and comes to life again…”

Check out my 4th book in the Mystical Vision of the Inklings series Fairy Tales for Grown-Ups: Rediscovering Myth and Meaning through Tolkien, Lewis, and Barfield

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Is Hermeneutics Related to Hermes? How to Reunite the Chards of Babel

Is hermeneutics related to Hermes? The word hermeneutics comes from the ancient Greek verb ἑρμηνεύειν (hermēneuein) — “to interpret, explain, translate”—which is etymologically and conceptually related to Hermes. True hermeneutics comes from Hermes.

The ancients believed that the messages of the gods were too cryptic for humans to grasp without an interpreter. Hermes—Mercury in Roman lore—was seen as the god of speech. In him, the transcendent meanings were translated into human language.

Hermes was a liminal figure—someone “in-between” worlds, times, and meanings. He embodied the idea of interpretation as a journey across a threshold. To truly understand a divine message, we must be carried from one realm into another—borne on winged sandals.

Without this journey, there is no understanding. Understanding is less a matter of data analysis than a passage between worlds. We must be transported across the threshold by Hermes himself. This ancient personification of understanding was, in its way, a prefiguration of “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.”

The Logos becomes a felt Presence so that we might understand God. Echoing the descent of the Logos to earth, C.S. Lewis describes the descent of Mercury in That Hideous Strength in terms that are almost Pentecostal:

“There came an instant at which both men [Ransom and Merlin] braced themselves… All the fragments—needle‑pointed desires, brisk merriments, lynx‑eyed thoughts—went rolling to and fro like glittering drops and reunited themselves. It was well that both men had some knowledge of poetry… For Ransom… it was heavenly pleasure. He found himself sitting within the very heart of language, in the white‑hot furnace of essential speech… For the lord of Meaning himself, the herald, the messenger, the slayer of Argus, was with them.” That Hideous Strength, “The Descent of the Gods.”

It was the felt presence of Mercury that brought celestial clarity to Ransom and his friends. And it was his felt presence that ultimately overthrew that hideous strength whose power chiefly came from perverting essential speech. What is essential speech? It’s the “reunited” speech that slays Argus—the giant with a hundred eyes, a fitting symbol of the ever-watchful N.I.C.E.

Broken speech can only be made whole in Pentecost. The fire of Pentecost reforges language, gathering the chards scattered by the confusion of Babel. It is the felt presence of the Lord of Meaning that enables us to understand. Yet in our own day, hermeneutics has been severed from Hermes—through the assumption that meaning can exist apart from Presence.

Unless the Word is enfleshed, it remains intangible and therefore hidden. There is no hermeneutics without an encounter with Hermes. Hermeneutics is often treated as an objective method of extracting meaning from a text, as if meaning resides solely in the words. But true meaning can only be found in the felt Presence of the Word.

During Covid, most of us met online, and for a while we thought it was no different from meeting in person. Yet after a couple of years of staring at screens, we realized how much meaning we were missing. We craved flesh-and-blood people. We longed for the eyes, the touch, the embrace. But why? All the words were conveyed just fine. The words were there—Hermes was not.

Without the descent of Hermes we can’t feel the heavenly pleasure of being “in the very heart of Language,” which is true hermeneutics. We hear words through headphones, see faces on screens, yet our hearts yearn for more. For what? For embodied Meaning—for the “Word made flesh.” And then, at last, the Covid restrictions were lifted, and we saw real human faces again.

In that moment, many of us realized—in a flash of Platonic anamnesis—that meaning cannot be digitized. It can only be read in the living contours of a real human face. Words without a body may denote, but they do not mean.

“We should not forget that there is more to the world than what we can interpret. The materiality and immediacy of our experiences are just as important.” Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Production of Presence

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What Do Plato and C.S. Lewis Have in Common?

What do Plato and C.S. Lewis have in common? One curious thing about Platonic ideas is that Plato used the Greek word for idea (εἴδω, eidō), which means “to see,” to denote something one cannot see. For Plato, the idea of a thing is its invisible essence. A carrot can be seen; the idea of a carrot cannot. “Carrotness” is invisible.

And yet, Plato uses the word “εἴδω,” which means “to see,” to point to the invisible. Why? How do you see the invisible? In Plato’s mind, a thing is not in one of two states — existing or not existing. It can be in a wide range of states depending on how far it is from the Idea of the thing. The closer a thing is to the Idea of the thing the more it “exists.”

That’s why Plato uses the term “anamnesis,” which means re-collection,to suggest that learning is essentially the soul’s act of remembering something that it has always known from its existence in the realm of Ideas. The soul is from that realm. It recognizes the perfect Ideas behind the shadows of this world — or it doesn’t.

That’s why human consciousness is symbolic. Whatever it looks at, it tries to “see” (εἴδω) — or rather “see through.” Its question is, “Do I recognize what’s behind this thing or not?” For the soul all things are symbolic. It strives to see the primal creative Logos (the perfect Idea) behind all things.

When it doesn’t it feels bad — the soul abides in the realm of symbols. When it does, it feels good because it recognizes its homeland. When the soul reads the pure poesis off the creation, it thrives. In Hebrews 8:5, it says about priests:

“They serve at a sanctuary that is a copy and shadow of what is in heaven. This is why Moses was warned when he was about to build the tabernacle: ‘See to it that you make everything according to the pattern shown you on the mountain.’”

When the soul creates, it always re-creates. It strives to remember what it saw in heaven before creating something on earth. It wants to create things that “truly exist.” The more symbolic meaning it imbues in a thing, the more it reminds us of heaven.

“Creation happens when the conscious mind allows the deeper, unconscious forces to emerge and manifest in the form of symbols.” Carl Jung

That’s why C.S. Lewis says in The Four Loves,

“The most important thing a mother can do for her child is to show him that he does not need her.”

The best form of parenting is to gradually redirect the child’s gaze from shadows to realities. The role of the mother (and father) is to show the child that they are not their real mother and father. They have Another Mother and Father. Human parenting is at its best when the child’s gaze is not tied to their earthly parents but sees through the parents to catch a glimpse of the real Mother and Father.

What do Plato and C.S. Lewis have in common?

A shadow is good only when it points to heaven and bad when it blocks the view of heaven. We think we live among things, but we live among symbols. If we are surrounded by things that cannot be recognized as symbols, we feel dead inside. When we recognize things as symbols, we come alive. Our eyes sparkle. We recognize the primordial poesis (the making) behind the world of shadows. We return home.

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What is Donegality in C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien?

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What is donegality? Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man represents the “perfect man,” based on the ancient knowledge of ratios and proportions in human anatomy. Leonardo, often called a Renaissance man, depicted something very different from the medieval understanding of man.

His Vitruvian Man is autonomous. There’s nothing around him. He is in the center. In the visions of Hildegard of Bingen, born in 1098, a man is also depicted in the center, except that the space/cosmos he is in is surrounded by the figure of God. The man is literally inside the womb of God.

In the medieval understanding, the man is in the center, and yet he is not. He exists in God’s embrace. The space/womb he is in is part of a Universal Body that has a head, face, hands, legs, and feet. The medieval man was not autonomous. He was loved. Embraced by the personal cosmos.

He lived, breathed, and moved inside the Divine womb. When the baby is inside the womb, they can’t see the mother, but they can divine her motherly presence in all things. She is hidden behind the walls of the world, and yet she is present in everything. The baby literally eats her body and lives off of her — her body is his whole world. The mother is hidden and yet revealed from the inside out.

C.S. Lewis once visited County Donegal in Ireland and was struck by the specific feel of the local landscape. He coined the term “donegality” to describe the unique atmosphere or mood that gives a particular setting or narrative its distinctive character. Donegality is a unique feel of something.

The Chronicles of Narnia is intentionally suffused with a certain donegality so we can recognize the Mother. All its symbolism — the talking animals, mythological landscapes, magical transformation — the whole atmosphere creates an irresistible sense of wonder and and an invitation to ask the main question: “Who?” Who is behind it?

To be born means to go out of the womb and see the mother face to face. But while we are in the womb, we live in her donegality. We see her dimly, as if through the looking-glass. We swim in the cosmos of her Divine Body, eating and drinking her self-revelations.

In J.R.R. Tolkien’s worlds, this “donegality” is even more pronounced because Iluvatar, the Divine Source, is mentioned only in the beginning of The Silmarillion. In the rest of the legendarium, he is not mentioned but implied. He is the force behind all forces. An attentive reader divines his Presence in all the peripeteia of the plot. Tolkien plunges us into the donegality of the Music of Iluvatar.

Both Lewis and Tolkien represented a deeply medieval understanding of man. The man is only himself when he is embraced by the cosmos of Divine love. The Divine love puts him in the center and nourishes him until he is ready to see her face to face. When in the womb, he sees her only in dreams, visions, symbols, metaphors, and parables. She is revealed from the inside out.

St. Gregory Palamas (1296–1359), a Byzantine monk and theologian, taught that even though God is unknowable in his essence, he is revealed in his energies. While in the womb, we cannot see God face to face, but we can know him partially through his energies. God manifests himself through his donegality, the unique atmosphere of the world.

That’s why Jesus said, “He who has ears, let him hear.” Hear what? The heartbeat of the mother, the warmth of her womb, the nourishment of her Body. When we feel embraced, we become ourselves. Divine donegality gives us the energy to be who we are.

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How Do We Understand What a Text Means?

How do we understand what a text means? How do we know what Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, C.S. Lewis, or Tolkien meant? Is it enough to read their books? How do we elicit meaning?

Isn’t it curious that God didn’t come to humanity with a book? He came with a body. The ultimate knowledge of God is enfleshed in the Son of God. He walked among us, and we saw his glory. The Logos became flesh and dwelt among us. We have seen, touched, smelled, and heard, and tasted Meaning. It affected us bodily. We dwelt in its Presence.

Apart from the body, Meaning is impervious. It is ungraspable at the level of the mind.

As Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht says:

“What we need is a form of thinking that is based on the possibility of presence and on the possibility of presence being related to meaning.”

Is meaning related to presence? It is. And our ability to perceive meaning arises from our contact with the Form. Meaning is read off of that Form in which it is embodied.

“That which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched—this we proclaim concerning the Word of life.”

The Logos must be incarnate to be perceivable. Knowledge without a body is misleading at best. We don’t arrive at Meaning through interpretation; we arrive at meaning through coming in contact with its embodied Presence.

Interpretation is misleading without Presence. It is a form of narcissism — we tend to reduce the Meaning to the lens through which we choose to see the world. When we see, touch, and taste the Presence, we don’t need to interpret. We grasp the Whole.

Interpretation is necessary when there’s no Presence. Interpretation is the child of absence. In the absence of the body, texts require interpretation. In the presence of the body, they come alive. They walk, talk, and dwell among us.

We see the text, talk with it, laugh with it, eat with it — we have a relationship with it. Meaning is what happens to us as we engage in that relationship. We know without interpreting. If we have to interpret, we don’t know.

“By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God.”

To know God means to touch his flesh. When we touch the Body, we know, and all texts come alive. When we interpret the text without touching the Body, it is a dead letter.

The Spirit loves forms. It loves being in the body. It creates “felt presences.” Whatever we encounter in a text, whether it’s Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, C.S. Lewis, Tolkien, or the Bible, already exists in this world as a Presence. Something that we can touch, see, and experience.

The moment we discover that Presence and engage with it, we discover that the text is not outside us to be interpreted. It is inside us to resonate with. We start looking for those resonances everywhere because we fall in love with the celestial Music they reveal.

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What is the Meaning of Aslan’s Name?

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What is the meaning of Aslan’s name in Narnia? I have always found it curious that the name of Aslan caused such different reactions in the Pevensie children. In fact, when I first read that passage, something jumped in me too:

“At the name of Aslan each one of the children felt something jump in its inside. Peter felt suddenly brave and adventurous. Susan felt as if some delicious smell or some delightful strain of music had just floated by her. And Lucy got the feeling you have when you wake up in the morning and realize that it is the beginning of the holidays or the beginning of summer.”

There was something relatable about it. Surprisingly, there was something relatable even in Edmund’s reaction to the name.

“But Edmund felt a sensation of mysterious horror.”

It felt like some judgment was going on. Not externally but internally. The name of Aslan was the ultimate revealer of what was in a person. It amplified the contents of your heart. If there was light in it, you could almost touch it. If there was darkness there, you couldn’t help but feel horror.

When I read John 3:19, it all came together:

“This is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and men loved the darkness rather than the light.” 

What is the meaning of Aslan’s name in Narnia? When the light comes, it reveals what is. There’s nothing else to judge. Judgment is internal. It jumps from within us every moment we encounter the Light. We either delight in the light or hide from it. Depending on the state of my consciousness in the moment, the Light will either make me lighter or heavier.

The same curious thing happened in The Lord of the Rings when the company entered Lothlórien. The effect of entering the realm of the Lady was such that all the company felt the presence of some inexplicable magic.

For some, it was a delight. For others, torment. Tolkien seems to suggest that the whole land was Galadriel’s mirror — not just the stone mirror itself. As the fellowship walked through the enchanted wood, they saw their secret thoughts and desires revealed as if in a mirror.

Some liked it; others hated it. But they couldn’t hide from it. They stepped into a land of the Last Judgement unfolding 24/7. Galadriel wasn’t the Judge — she was the revealer of what was in each person’s heart. The Judgement was internal, not external.

For Boromir it was torment. For Aragorn, it was a delight. Boromir said,

“It is said that few come out who once go in; and of that few none have escaped unscathed.’ ‘Say not unscathed, but if you say unchanged, then maybe you will speak the truth,’ said Aragorn.”

In the final analysis, we are all judged by how we respond to our encounter with the Ultimate Beauty. For some, it is an eternal delight. For some, eternal torment. If you come with a pure heart, it is a delight. If you come with an idol, it is a curse.

The Light is always sweet for the one who allows it in. It is a horror to the one who doesn’t. The encounter with the Ultimate Beauty can be either heaven or hell — depending on what is inside one’s heart already.