Blessings, Ben, as you finish your paper up.

win

surprise how much effort you put to make such a magnificent

informative website.

Let me start by also suggesting Colin Duriez’s book, “The CS Lewis Encyclopedia.” It is a great reference. This is how he addresses the matter of the “numinous.”

“Numinous: An all-pervasive sense of the other is focused in a quality of the numinous, a basic human experience charted by the German thinker Rudolf Otto in his book, “The Idea of the Holy” (1923), which deeply influenced Lewis. The primary numinous experience involves a sense of dependence upon what stands wholly other to mankind. This otherness (or otherworldliness) is unapproachable and awesome. But it has a fascination. The experience of the numinous is captured better by suggestion and allusion than by a theoretical analysis.”

“Many realities captured in imaginative fiction could be described as having some quality of the numinous. CS Leis realized this, incorporation the idea into his apologetic for the Christian view of suffering, “The Problem of Pain,” and he cited an event from Kenneth Graham’s fantasy for children, “The Wind in the Willows,” to illustrate it. The final part of “The Voyage of the Dawn Treader” particularly embodies the numinous, as travelers approach Aslan’s Country across the Last Sea.”

“Where the numinous is captured, its appeal is firstly to the imagination, which also senses it most accurately. It belongs to the area of meaning that we cannot easily conceptualize. CS Lewis found the numinous when he read George MacDonald’s “Phantasies,” describing the effect in “Surprised by Joy” as baptizing his imagination. It was years later that he was able to reconcile this experience with his thinking.”
-Colin Duriez, “The CS Lewis Encyclopedia”, page 149. Copyright 2000 by Inspirational Press.

If you look at the introduction to Lewis’ book, he unpackages the idea of numinous a bit — separating the idea of fear (the lion in the next room) from dread (the ghost in the room) from awe (the presence of the altogether holy God in the room). Like Duriez points out, it is not so much a tangible experience or feeling that one can put their finger on by analysis, but it is the twisting of one’s gut or perhaps the goose-bumps that arise on one’s arms or the small hairs on the back of one’s neck standing up in the presence of one totally not of this world.

I think that an excellent Biblical example can be found in the various theophanies we find in the Bible — Isaiah’s experience in the Temple in Isaiah 6, for example, where Isaiah’s only response is: “woe is me.” John the Apostle has a similar experience in Revelation 1, where his only reaction is to fall down as if dead. It is the kind of sense that we ought to get when we come into the presence of God for prayer and worship (though we are often way too casual in both of these areas).

In Lewis’ writings, he develops the idea of “the normal.” For a lack of a better way to describe it, it comes from the sense that there are certain attributes that are found pleasing to the eye — certain shapes, colors, combinations of sounds, proportions, for example, that just seem “right” and proper and others that seem at best unpleasant and at worst, obscene.

It is from the presence of the numinous that the “normal” gets its “rightness.” And that is what leads to the Problem of Pain. God is good and his presence of holiness (numinous) is right and holy. Why then does this God permit such wickedness to take place n this world of his?

Here is my suggestion. Plow through the book and get the gist of his argument, and then come back to this idea some, and hopefully this will help make things make sense. Hopefully you find this helpful, but don’t hesitate to raise questions, I am happy to help where I can.

Blessings,

win

w