Beginning with a broader talk on Great Books and transitioning to an examination of some of C.S. Lewis’s ideas and books, Ken Boa presented this half-hour talk at a Lewis-themed men’s retreat at Eagle Ranch in Flowery Branch, GA, in June 2018.
In this introductory session, Ken discusses the relationship between higher and lower things (the heavenly and the earthly), a central theme in Lewis’s (and others’) writings. “The higher can account for the lower, but the lower can never account for the higher,” Ken contends, and as Lewis believed, lower things are copies of higher things (not the other way around) while we remain in the “shadowlands” of this earthly life. Lewis used story to illuminate higher truths, and after his conversion, his mind was unleashed to do so in ingenious fashion, through writings such as the Ransom Trilogy (or Space Trilogy), the Chronicles of Narnia, and The Great Divorce. Lewis saw the shadowlands as scattered with “hints of heaven,” things that point to the beauty, love, and goodness we will enjoy forever in the presence of God.
