What if the path to truth doesn’t only go through logic, but also through longing? What if God is calling not only through doctrine, but through desire? And what if the imagination isn’t just a place for fantasy, but a battleground for the soul?

C.S. Lewis believed it was.

Lewis saw the imagination not as a tool for escape, but as a faculty of awakening. For Lewis, imagination was not opposed to reason, it complimented it. He called it, “the organ of meaning”. In his hands, the imagination became an avenue of truth, a means through which the unseen could be known, and the eternal glimpsed through the temporal. In Surprised by Joy, Lewis outlines three kinds of imagination. The first is wish fulfillment, what we often call daydreams. We all know this one we’re the hero, the lover, the victor. It centers on the self, and Lewis saw it as the least noble use of imagination. The second kind is invention. The ability to depict reality with clarity. This was Lewis’ great gift. Through story and image, he allowed us to see truth not abstractly, but vividly. Invention enlarges the soul, giving flesh to ideas. The third is perception. This is imagination at its highest. It’s what Lewis described as joy or more precisely in German, sehnsucht. A deep yearning for something beyond the world that feels paradoxically, more real than the world itself.

This longing isn’t a defect, it’s a compass. To Lewis, it pointed towards God. This sacred longing was not wishful thinking, but more so a signal. Lewis found in the myths of the old world; norse, celtic, classical epics a peculiar echo of that longing. He loved them for their beauty, but could not accept them for truth. It was only when colleagues, J.R.R. Tolkien and Hugo Dyson helped him see that Christianity was the true myth, God’s myth that everything began to cohere.

His conversion was a reconciliation of reason and imagination. Its simple, really for when we exercise faith, what else do we engage but our imaginations? We wrap words around things in the world to define them, and gain greater clarity. The word definition means “of the finite”. Thus we use our reason to understand the particulars of our world. But God is infinite; he breaks the category of definition. We can’t wrap words around him, and our reason collapses in attempting to apprehend him. To understand God, at all, we must speak by what the medieval scholastics called the way of analogy. Jesus himself spoke about the Kingdom of Heaven only in parables or similes. That is, he used depictions of the imagination that would allow us to grasp, in human terms, a dim idea of God’s attributes.

This Jesus says, the Kingdom of Heaven is like a man who sowed good seed. Like treasure hidden in a field. Like a merchant looking for fine pearls. Each of these is a depiction of a thing from human experience. Using an analogy that allows us to apply our imaginative grasp of that thing to God. So Lewis crafted – not parables, but stories. He gave us Narnia, Perelandra, and the Great Divorce. His goal wasn’t entertainment, but evangelism – a baptism of the imagination. To help us long for Heaven.