The Prison of The Mind

(The Chronicles of Narnia: The Last Battle)

“It's all in Plato, all in Plato:  Bless me, what do they teach them at these schools?”

Professor Diggory Kirke, the Pevensie children’s eccentric uncle, would be proud of me, for I have been teaching lots of Plato over the last few weeks – and have done so for nearly fifteen years.  Last week, I was tempted to link The Silver Chair to Plato’s ‘Allegory of the Cave’, which was clearly a big influence on C. S. Lewis, but I couldn’t resist Puddleglum’s pessimism.  So I decided to leave The Cave for a rainy day.  And I’m so glad I did, because I had completely forgotten that C. S.  Lewis explicitly references the great Greek philosopher, Plato, before re-reading The Last Battle for this post.  My little body went all tingly, I tell you.  It really did.

At the end of The Last Battle, we find the heroes of Narnia in a beautifully strange new world which they rather confusingly discover is in fact ‘the real Narnia’.  And in order to guide the reader a little in understanding the relationship between this new land and the land they had once known as Narnia, C. S. Lewis gives Professor Diggory my new favourite Last Battle line:

“It's all in Plato, all in Plato: Bless me, what do they teach them at these schools?”

But not everyone experienced the new ‘real Narnia’ as beautiful.  In the final fight between the Narnians and the Calormenes, known as The Battle of Stable Hill or The Last Battle, a group of dwarfs sided only with themselves and indiscriminately attacked both warring armies, before being captured and thrown into the stable.  Now, despite the fact that Aslan had enchanted the door so it would bring the people into this better, realer, more beautiful version of Narnia, the Dwarfs could not see it.  They believed they were in a stable, without light, and anyone who tried to suggest anything else was tricking them.  Even Aslan could not convince them with his ‘glorious feast’:

“Aslan raised his head and shook his mane.  Instantly a glorious feast appeared on the Dwarfs’ knees: pies and tongues and pigeons and trifles and ices, and each Dwarf had a goblet of good wine in his right hand.  But it wasn’t much use.  They began eating and drinking greedily enough, but it was clear that they couldn’t taste it properly. They thought they were eating and drinking only the sort of things you might find in a Stable.  One said he was trying to eat hay and another said he had got a bit of an old turnip and a third said he’d found a raw cabbage leaf.  And they raised golden goblets of rich red wine to their lips and said, ‘Ugh! Fancy drinking dirty water out of a trough that a donkey’s been at!  Never thought we’d come to this.’  But very soon every Dwarf began suspecting that every other Dwarf had found something nicer than he had, and they started grabbing and snatching, and went on to quarreling, till in a few minutes there was a free fight and all the good food was smeared on their faces and clothes or trodden under foot.  But when at last they sat down to nurse their black eyes and their bleeding noses, they all said: ‘Well, at any rate, there’s no Humbug here.  We haven’t let anyone take us in The Dwarfs are for the Dwarfs!’

‘You see,’ said Aslan. ‘They will not let us help them.  They have chosen cunning instead of belief.  Their prison is only in their own minds, yet they are in that prison; and so afraid of being taken in, that they cannot be taken out.”

Our interior life matters.  A lot.  It’s the key, the door, the window, the road, the path, the secret… the way home.

Plato’s Allegory of the Cave is one of the most famous and influential philosophical stories, presented in his work Republic to compare ‘the effect of education and the lack of it on our nature.’  It is our story. 

Imagine prisoners born into captivity.  With only other prisoners for company.  Chained in a cave, they face a wall of moving shadows.  This is all they know.  This is their reality.  This is their truth.  Now, imagine if one of the prisoners escaped.  They would see that the shadows were mere projections from objects moving between the cave wall and a fire.  And what if they dared to climb even higher!  They would see that the fire was a much smaller version of a vast sun. 

Here is one way of looking at this richly layered story: 

We are the prisoners.  And the cave is our mind.  It is the particular walls of our own small world.  The shadows are all the values, beliefs and opinions that our culture, family and experience has projected onto our minds.  It is everything we have learned.  Everything we have seen.  Everything we have heard.  Everything we have felt.  It is our reality.  For better or for worse, it is our truth.  The shadows are the messages we have absorbed from our early relationships, traumas, rewards, victories, sanctions, films, adverts, preachers, teachers, abusers, soothers and so on.  They are the messages we believe about beauty, success, happiness, love, and who we are, and what life is about.

But how to escape the prison of our mind?  How do we see beyond the shadows?  How do we turn around and walk towards the light, especially when all our companions seem glued to the spectacle on the cave walls?

We dare to question them. 

Plato’s hero is Socrates.  He is the escaped prisoner.  He has the courage to ask difficult questions.  He dares to find exceptions in the messages he has inherited.  And if exceptions can be found, the message can’t be entirely true.

What messages from our past experiences, that have been projected on our minds, need holding up to the light of the fire and the sun?  Success is status; beauty is looks; fame is great; love is romance; happiness is pleasure; vulnerability is weakness; darkness is bad; bodies are shameful; emotions are hidden; dreams are fantasies; the universe is frightening; we’re here to please; we’re here to consume; we’re here to hide…

How we interpret the world is everything.  The dwarfs in The Last Battle have formed a habit of mind which is near impossible to break.  They had separated themselves from everyone and wanted to be left entirely to themselves.  Their controlling, defensive and paranoid lens prevented them from seeing and experiencing the gloriously abundant gift of grace.  What we see, really is, what we get.  A feast or a fight?  If we see the worst in ourselves and each other, we will get it, because that is what we see.

The Dwarfs only really know how to protect themselves and fight for survival.  It’s not their fault.  They don’t know how to trust, enjoy and share.  In the same way, it’s not to our credit or discredit which cave we’ve been born into.  No-one chooses to be born into a particular body, family or culture.  No one chooses to be born!

But it seems, that there does exist, inside, a glitch in the prison system.   Something that can see beyond the shadows.  Something that can question.  A force that doesn’t seem completely determined by the laws of causality.  Something that doesn’t seem entirely bound by the rules of biology, physics and chemistry, or indeed, the fundamental principle of evolutionary-psychology and sociology.  Something is free.  Something is transcendent.  Beyond time and sense experience.  Something eternal.

Aslan makes it clear: ‘Their prison is only in their own minds’.

Only?

He makes it sound so easy.  And perhaps, in one way, it is.  But it takes courage.  The end of Plato’s Allegory is not such a happy ending.  But I think it teaches an important lesson.  The escaped prisoner returns to the cave to try and tell all the other prisoners about the new, free, beautiful, spacious real world.  But the escaped prisoner’s eyes have become accustomed to the sunlight, and when they return, they are blinded by the oppressive darkness of the cave.  The other prisoners, according to Plato, would infer from the returning prisoner’s blindness that the journey out of the cave had harmed them and that they should definitely not take such a journey!  In fact, he concludes that they would reach out and kill anyone who attempted to drag them out of the cave. 

So, we can’t necessarily expect friends, relatives and colleagues to get it when we try and free our minds.  We must expect a bit of hostility.

Freedom is threatening, to our own sense of self and control, and to the sense of self and control of those around us.  But what we see, is what we get.  Our interpretations either save us, or condemn us.  The stories we tell, and live, matter.  And our minds can help us enter a realer, newer, better and more beautiful world.

“It's all in Plato, all in Plato: Bless me, what do they teach them at these schools?”