Bowen book sure to delight all 'Narnians'
The Spirituality of Narnia: The Deeper Magic of C. S. Lewis
by John P. Bowen
Vancouver: Regent College Publishing, 2007
143 pages, $19.95
Reviewed by George Porter
E. B. White wrote that ‘it is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer.’ John Bowen, a professor at Wycliffe College at the University of Toronto, is both, and he has demonstrated his abilities as a writer very clearly in this recently released book that is 
sure to delight all “Narnians.”
In a world nearly saturated with books about C. S Lewis and Narnia, do we really need yet another about either? In Bowen’s case, the answer is clearly yes.
The world of Narnia, created by this Oxford/Cambridge scholar and Christian apologist nearly half a century ago, still fascinates many people of all ages, capturing our sense of adventure and our love of heroic tales. Bowen confesses his great love for The Chronicles of Narnia that inspired such writers as Neil Gaiman and the recently deceased Madelaine L’Engle, and they were a sort of foil for Lewis antagonist Philip Pullman’s work.
Lewis’s books do more, however, than entertain us with epic tales. They engage us in a spiritual journey –– a quest to know the great adventure of life lived with God. According to Bowen, stories both shape and reflect our beliefs. The two can never be ultimately separated, and “it is impossible to ask which comes first, the story or the belief” since “each feeds the other” (15). Bowen engages the Chronicles in his book as he traces a Narnian spirituality of C. S. Lewis through the stories.
The human spiritual quest leads us to many questions, but Narnian spirituality, Bowen says, revolves primarily around the questions of the meaning of life. Answering these questions lays a foundation for many others. His approach is not to analyse the books and present defined doctrines, but to cast a vision along the lines of Lewis’s thought, sighting the implications for spiritual pilgrimage.
Chapters develop themes in the overarching Biblical drama as Lewis sought to tell them in stories, “casting all these things into an imaginary world, stripping them of their stained-glass and Sunday school associations,” so that “one could make them for the first time appear in their real potency” and “steal past those watchful dragons” which tend to frighten people off spiritual experience by “giving off that unpleasant churchy odor” (42).
Bowen notes that while the stories convey Biblical good news, they are not allegory. Details don’t always match up and should not be pressed to do so. Lewis considered the Biblical story to be the “hidden story” in the Chronicles. With his friend J. R. R. Tolkien, Lewis wanted these stories to echo “the Great Story … so that, when a story rings true for us, it is because it draws us closer to God’s story” (131).
This will no doubt frustrate those looking for the neat and tidy, but there are always some things, which seem not yet finally resolved. As Bowen says, the ultimate challenge of the stories is how they might help people now shape their own stories and how the two mingle together to shape our own perspectives and our own encounters with “the naked Other” (141).
Well written, cogent and true to the spirit of Narnia, Bowen’s book is a valuable contribution to Lewis literature and to the understanding of the place of story in our own beliefs and spirituality. It is also a wonderful invitation to hear the Biblical good news again for the first time.
The Rev. Dr. George Porter is diocesan Canon for Youth and director of Youth Action.
