C. S. Lewis: Transposition

Lewis tackles a very difficult problem in this essay: What really is the relationship between the spiritual world, which we cannot see, and the physical world, in which we receive with all our senses?  How is spiritual reality present in material reality?  The presence of the spiritual within the physical he terms sacramental.  But in some instances the spiritual flows through the material and at other times it does not. The process whereby the spiritual communicates itself through the physical he terms transposition.  

Transposition occurs only for the spiritually minded.  The natural man cannot receive the things of the Spirit of God; they are spiritually discerned.  People see according to their natures (Cf. Psa, 18:25, 26).  Even so, try as we may, we do not find any of the descriptions of heaven, or our imaginations of it, very desirable.   But our imaginations are confined to using images of the world we know.  Hence, the importance of hope: the reliance by faith upon the promises of God that he has prepared for his people a city that is beyond our imaginations to depict, but will not disappoint.

Lewis applies the principle of transposition to the fact that, using the images of the physical life–which is all that our imaginations have to work with–life in heaven cannot be made to seem very desirable. He writes:

‘We know not what we shall be’; but we may be sure we shall be more, not less, than we were on earth.  Our natural experiences (sensory, emotional, imaginative) are only like [a] drawing, like penciled lines on flat paper.

By transposition they will possess a fulness of spiritual reality which is quite beyond our present experiences, and unimaginable.   

  He then draws four conclusions: He denies that his view is one of development; rather transposition makes a natural image a new and different thing.  This may help us to take a better view of  the Incarnation.  It also helps us see why  the materialist cannot understand spiritual reality.  And, finally, it sheds new light on the doctrine of the resurrection of the body.  

He concludes:

May we not, by a reasonable analogy, suppose likewise that there is not experience of the spirit so transcendent and supernatural, no vision of Deity Himself so close and so far beyond all images and emotions, that to it also there cannot be an appropriate correspondence on the sensory level?  Not by a new sense but by the incredible flooding of hose very sensations we now have with a meaning, a transvaluation, of which we have here no faintest guess?

Were Lewis given to quote Scripture, he could well have quoted II Cor 5:4:  “For while we are still in this tent, we groan under our burden, because we wish not to be unclothed but to be further clothed, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life.”

DO YOU FIND LEWIS’ THINKING HELPFUL?  SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS.  

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