The Christ Centred Cosmic Civilisation

Episode 119h - Sung Into Being - Creation is more music than matter

• Paul

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What if the world began with a voice so beautiful it hurt to hear? We open The Magician’s Nephew and step into a cosmos where stars ignite on cue, animals rise from the soil, and a Lion sings meaning into matter. From London attics to the Wood Between the Worlds to the ruined hush of Charn, we follow Digory and Polly as wonder expands and the stakes sharpen.

Aslan’s creation anchors our journey: creation as music, not accident. We connect the scene to the great scriptural chorus—Genesis’ speaking, John’s Word, Job’s singing stars—and explore how that vision dignifies a humming, vibrant universe. Then the key turn: Jadis enters. Her knowledge of deep magic, her force and poise, and her timing reveal how evil persuades by offering shortcuts that feel noble. That sets the stage for Digory’s test: a dying mother, a guarded apple, and a choice between grasping and trusting. We unpack why obedience in Narnia is not dreary rule-keeping but relational confidence in a king who sees what we cannot, and how patient trust brings the right healing in the right way.

Threaded through is a case for re-enchantment. Modern life trains us to treat the world as flat and empty; Narnia teaches us to hear the underlying score. We consider the Wood’s many pools as a theology of possibility, Charn’s silence as a warning about power without love, and Aslan’s song as a call to live inside a meaningful cosmos. If you’ve ever felt the ache for more—more depth, more music, more reality—this conversation invites you to read The Magician’s Nephew not as a mere prequel but as a parable of beginnings that never stop beginning: creation, fall, trust, and the long work of joy.

Enjoyed the journey? Follow the show, share this episode with a friend who needs wonder, and leave a review to help others find the music.

The theme music is "Wager with Angels" by Nathan Moore

SPEAKER_00:

Well, welcome to the Christ Center Cosmic Civilization, and we're still in the Narnia series, and we've got to what was the penultimate published book, but if we're going through the chronology of Narnia, this is the first one. The Magician's Nephew. It's about well, it every story has a beginning, and in Narnia, this is the beginning of Narnia. And the beginning is a song, as we'll see. This volume was the one that, as a child reading them, this is the one that has the longest impression on me. As a child, it was so powerful to me. There were so many ideas in The Magician's Nephew from The Song of Creation, The Wood Between the Worlds, these rings that have magical powers. And the it's a there is a magician in the modern world, and that in it that is also a whole rich seam of imagination. And then Aslan. Queen Jadis is sort of a compelling character too. But the magician's nephew was the one was the volume that left had the most like effect upon my imagination. So the magician's nephew, if you if we want to read the series of Narnia in a chronological way, you will begin with this one. And usually this is the one I begin with when I do a read-through. I read this, then Lion, Witch in the Wardrobe, and then move on through that. But the Magician's Nephew takes us back before the wardrobe, before the pevancies, before the White Witch's reign. It's the story of how Narnia came to be and how evil entered its world. The three themes that I've sort of tried to isolate for this is the account of creation and Aslan's role in that. The fall, so it's creation, fall, and temptation. Obedience and temptation. So Aslan is the creation figure. Jadis with the apple is the fall story. And Diggory is the one who's tempted and his obedience or trust. It's trust and obedience. These are the themes that tell us again. A great retelling of the drama of creation fall and the prospect of redemption. Well, let's set the stage. The story begins in London with two children, Diggory and Polly. Actually, these characters crop up in future volumes when they're adults. But uh through the experiments of Diggory's uncle, Andrew, they Diggory and Polly end up in other worlds. Initially, the wood between the worlds, and then into Narnia. But the the thing that captivated me, and I'm only saying this in passing, is the fact that the wood between the worlds has pools that would potentially lead to a huge number of other worlds. And C.S. Lewis then has this idea of there being many, many worlds, and the Bible does hint at that in at least two places, that there are many worlds, and what is the status of those worlds? Humanity is the center of the universe because God the Sun became a human, but but what of other worlds? C.S. Lewis attempts to explore that in his space trilogy, in one way. Here there's this other way because we've got at least Narnia and then our planet Earth. But uh anyway, they uh Diggory and Polly, they they start they stumble into other worlds and they experience two other worlds, Narnia and Charn. So that this dying world of Charn, that's a world that's coming to the end of its life. The sun is dying, and it's a tantalizing, again, such a fascinating world in terms of imagination, because it's like there was once a bustling, fascinating, vast metropolis and a whole world of sophistication, high civilization, and so on, and now it's all gone. And well, Queen Jadis awakens, Diggory does awaken her unintentionally, and uh she follows them back away from child. Jadis is such a fascinating character because she's evil, but she has this deep understanding of like the deep magic, not the deepest magic that Aslan knows of, but she does know the deep magic, and she knows she kind of even when Aslan sings, Jadis understands it, what's happening, and she is very powerful, very knowledgeable, and very powerful physically and intellectually. But anyway, Diggory and Polly, that eventually they find themselves after leaving Chan, they find themselves in what is the kind of unformed Narnia, a dark, empty void. And then they hear it, a song, a song, a deep resonant music that calls stars into being and awakens the land and brings Narnia to life. So I I'll share this little bit from Magician's Nephew. It says, In the darkness, something was happening at last. A voice had begun to sing. It was very far away, and Diggory found it hard to decide from what direction it was coming. Sometimes it seemed to come from all directions at once. Sometimes he almost thought it was coming out of the earth beneath them. Its lower notes were deep enough to be the voice of the earth herself. There were no words, there was hardly even a tune, but it was beyond comparison the most beautiful noise he'd ever heard. It was so beautiful he could hardly bear it. And then the horse enjoys it and the cabby's like gorgeous lovely And then two wonders happened at the same time. One was that the voice was suddenly joined by the other voices, more voices than you could possibly count. They were in harmony with it, but far higher up the scale, cold, tingling, silvery voices. The second wonder was that the blackness overhead all at once was blazing with stars. They didn't come out gently one by one as they do on a summer evening. One moment there'd been nothing but darkness. Next moment, a thousand, thousand points of light leapt out. Single stars, constellations and planets brighter and bigger than any in our world. There were no clouds, the new stars and the new voices began at exactly the same time. If you'd seen and heard it, as Diggory did, you would have felt quite certain that it was the stars themselves which were singing, and that it was the first voice, the deep one, which had made them appear and made them sing. Well, that that that account is a wonderful, wonderful account of creation. It's Aslan's creation, a world sung into existence, but even in this new world, evil enters. Jadis plants herself in Narnia and Diggory faces a test. So it's obviously not just a children's adventure. This is, it's not hard to see how this is a retelling, a re-mythologizing of Genesis. And so this theme of creation by the word, but in the form of singing rather than speech, and the musical character of that. The Bible does seem to hint that at the creation of the world, as Joe in the book of Job, we learn the when the morning stars sang together. So at the very least, they were singing music as the father spoke his Logos word to create the universe. But C.S. Lewis has it as if the father is singing, or well, it's Aslan, it's Jesus who is singing. So that it it we would perhaps want to say the father sends his son to sing creation into being. Tolkien has a version of this in the Einar Lunderlei, but it's I don't think it's as good as C.S. Lewis. C. S. Lewis's description of creation is one of the most beautiful passages in all the Chronicles of Narnia. The stars burst into song, the earth stirs, trees, rivers, animals awaken. C.S. Tolkien has a version of creation that's about song and music, but it's it's more complicated and isn't quite so obviously Jesus-centered. Whereas in this, Aslan is just so wonderful and real. It's creation by the word, capital W, the one who is the word, and obviously Genesis 1, John 1, Colossians 1, Hebrews 1, Proverbs 8, it's all in our minds. God said, God said, God said, as it is in Genesis 1. Here, Aslan sings, Aslan sings. So C.S. Lewis is reminding us that creation is not random, meaningless, but it's the overflow of the divine life, divine joy. The world is not an accident, it's a song. Music is written into it at the deepest level. And the more we understand the heavens and the earth, the more clear that is that there is a kind of vibration at the deepest levels of cosmic reality. And that vibration we could translate into sound, because sound is vibration, and it is possible to listen to the planets and the stars if we tune in to the vibrations of all the planets and so on. So it it it it's the Bible talks like this, physics or astrophysics confirms this, and C.S. Lewis beautifully expresses it in this mythological form. Notice as well, though, that creation, this even the creation is is sort of almost communal, that the stars, and in the passage that I read, the stars are joining in with creation, and the animals awaken. The land itself responds, and the it's like the earth produces the animals, and that that is true to the text of Genesis. In Genesis, it says, May the land produce the animals. So the animals don't come out of thin air, they come out of the soil in the Genesis 1 account, and they do here in the Magician's Nephew, there's like big mounds of earth, and then there's one huge one for an elephant, but little ones too, and the and the animals kind of break out of the soil. But I like the fact that the creation kind of joins in with the song of creation, and the Bible kind of has that idea that that carries on the singing along with the song of the living God, and that the whole creation kind of there's a kind of song of creation that carries on. But so the world's not an accident, it's a song. Creation is not silent, it's symphonic. And I mean, this for me as a child, this I don't know when I first read it, I was certainly under 10, could have been six or five or six, maybe seven, I'm not sure. But this vision of creation does awaken a kind of wonder and an expectation about the world, the cosmos, the heavens and the earth. It like the because the problem, as we've sometimes explored in this podcast, the the modern world is this brutally cruel indoctrination to make us think of the world as empty, flat, and meaningless. And what C.S. Lewis is doing is giving us, well, for us as children, for me as a child, it was one of the important ways that we were able to mount a resistance to that. Or at least he before I even knew there was a need for resistance, he was tuning me up to make me so that when when the indoctrination was pushing in later, I I resisted it because I'd already had a taste of a much more real and objective and realistic view of the heavens and the earth. And Narnia had helped with that, and and and and as adults, it reminds us that the world we inhabit is charged with meaning. Every tree, every star, every river is part of the cosmic song led by the chief musician who is Jesus Christ Himself. So this is part of why C.S. Lewis wrote the whole Narnia Chronicles to re-enchant our vision of the world. We live in a disenchanted world that's been stripped of its true form and meaning, and we are kind of forbidden from paying attention to the world as it really is, and we have to always pretend that it's something flat and meaningless. And not and C.S. Lewis is waking us from our slumber or stupor to remind us that creation is a harmonious, beautiful, deep, high, full gift, and not a meaningless, flat accident. The world is not just matter, it is music. And so to our second theme, which is the fall, the entrance of evil into Narnia. Because even in this new world, evil has entered. Jadis, the Queen of Charn, brings corruption into Narnia. She represents the intrusion of sin, fall, and the fallenness that damages, corrupts Mars creation. So in a way, C.S. Lewis is echoing Genesis three, because is the serpent who is the dragon, who is the devil, is that character, Satan, Lucifer, already evil? See if if Lu like there's the general Christian view is no, Satan falls in the Garden of Eden. So there is no evil at all until Satan with humanity fall in Genesis chapter 3. But there is this there is another kind of Christian view, which is that Satan fell earlier than that in some like prequel to the Bible, and that he's already evil and then comes into the Garden of Eden a bit like from another world, maybe, or from another age of the universe, or something like that. So C.S. Lewis is kind of in that camp, isn't he? Where there's been a world that's run its course and come to its end, and and and Jadis, who is like Satan here, is from that world and then comes into the beginning of this world. So with that view, Satan has an implied long prehistory. There's a backstory before Genesis 3 implied. So Jadis enters Narnia as this supremely evil being who has already messed up and killed everybody in her own world. And so is that the case? C.S. Lewis perhaps does think Satan has already fallen, already caused Mahem, maybe in the heavenlies, maybe in another age of the universe. Now Jadis Diggory is tempted, and Jadis, there's a whole business with an apple, and Jadis brings this to Diggory or confronts him with this temptation. Because Diggory, his mother, is dying back in London, and he longs for a cure for her. And he's he's anticipated this idea that there is a land of youth. And if there was something from the land of youth, his mother could be completely healed. So Aslan sends him to fetch an apple from a garden, but Jadis is there, and she tempts him to take the fruit for yourself. Don't take it back to Aslan, you keep it for yourself because this would heal your mother, and surely, surely that's more important than anything. Use the apple to heal your mother. Disobey the light. Don't trust Aslan. He's not out for your good. Rather, you must care for yourself, you must take charge of your own situation. You decide what's right and wrong. You can't trust anybody else to make those decisions. You must take responsibility for your what is good and evil. So that's just like the devil in Genesis, and that primal evil. The primal evil in the Bible is the seizing, is is trying to determine what is good and evil for ourselves. Which is why ethics is the study of that. Ethics is trying to determine what is good and evil, which is why ethics is the supreme evil. Anytime we are attempting to do that, determine what is good and evil on any ground other than Jesus. We are involved in the supreme evil. So Diggory is faced with this problem. Should I trust Aslan or do I take my own decision about what's right and wrong and take the apple for my mother? So the you know, the temptation seize what does not belong to us, grasp at life apart from Christ, apart from Aslan. Well, Diggory resists. He does trust Aslan, he does obey, but the shadow of the fall remains. Jadus is there, temptation is there, sin is present, evil has entered Narnia, and so this long story of sin, fall, and then redemption, it all must unfold. So Lewis, C.S. Lewis is showing us that even in this brand new creation, there is this battle between trust and unbelief, obedience and disobedience, and that is the key story of humanity. That every that's what humanity is all about. Do we trust Christ or not? Everything else is a footnote compared to that. That is the big story. Do we trust Christ? That's all we'll ever be judged for on the day of judgment. Did you trust Christ or not? And everything is a footnote to that. And in a way, C.S. Lewis is at least acknowledging how important that is, even in a new creation. Our final theme is this business of obedience and temptation, because Diggory's test is well, it's deeply moving, and it's been foreshadowed earlier in the novel. This bus this idea of his mother, and and she's very ill, and the little hints that are given in the story suggest that she may not have long. And so Diggory's desperate to heal his mother. And a child, it's it's very hard for a child to make like a decision like Diggory has to do. Because to you know, his mother or father is everything to him, and his desire is good to heal his mother, but the way to heal her is wrong to take the apple for himself for selfish reasons, to kind of not trust Aslan. So maybe his mother would be healed that way, but it would have bad consequences, and that way that it's an to get we could get something good by turning away from Jesus, but in doing so, there's corruption, there's damage, there's darkness, and that to pursue human flourishing as an end in itself, that's often spoken about in our time. Like human flourishing is considered to almost be an ultimate, like anything is justified so long as it leads to human flourishing. And C.S. Lewis, of course, sees sees the he's always pushing at this problem of pursuing something as an end in itself, or even to say, like to follow Aslan in order to get something from him. C. S. Lewis talks about if people claim to be becoming Christians, but it's for a selfish agenda, they're not really Christians. So Aslan the it's the con yeah, the the the complexity of this temptation for Diggory. It's he wants something good, but he he he can't have it without being disobedient and unbelieving. Well, Aslan doesn't give Diggory the apple for his mother. Instead, Aslan does just call Diggory to trust him. Later, Aslan provides a different fruit, one that heals Diggory's mother in the right way at the right time. And that is this lesson of trust and obedience, that Christ is the divine emperor, the eternal son of the Father, and the way he governs the universe is much higher than our ways of thinking and and and planning. His timing is perfect. He doesn't think about what's easiest in the moment, but thinks on a much bigger, longer scale. And so we're called not to grasp onto life because Jesus warned us, didn't he, that if we attempt to grasp onto life, we'll lose it. But if we let it go, then we'll receive it because we are trusting him. So Diggory's obedience is tough, it's costly to trust in that way, but it leads to a wonderful blessing. And that's I feel that with this story, where we are constantly tempted to seize control, to grasp at life on our own terms. But the call of discipleship is to trust the Lord Jesus even when we don't understand. So obedience is not about denial, denying ourselves or denying the world, or denying anything. Really, obedience is all based on trust, and C.S. Lewis brings that out powerfully. So why does this story matter? The Magician's nephew, it's full of wonderful imaginative things. I love this story. It matters because it tells us great truths about creation, it's equipping us to have a better enchanted view of the heavens and the earth around us, pushing back against the dark indoctrination that is forced upon us. It shows us the magician's nephew shows us that evil is real. Temptation is subtle, complex, not easy to resist, and to resist temptation can be costly, painful, and may in the short term appear to be the completely the wrong thing. Obedience, though, and trust, though costly, does lead to life. It is the better thing. So it's not just the beginning of Narnia here, it's the beginning of every story creation, fall, trust, faith in the one who made us. These are the issues. So here's the invitation. If you've not read Magician's Nephew, do read it, but read it with some depth. It's not just a prequel. Someone recently just said to me, Oh, is that just the kind of prequel to so we could get an extra novel out? And I was ghast. I'm like, oh my goodness, no. It's not that, it's this deep parable of creation and fall and another glorious presentation of Aslan, the Lord Jesus. So as you read it, think about this recovery, recovery of the wonder of creation, and feel the challenge about temptation and think about use this read through as a way of analysing the ways we may attempt to grasp at good things in the wrong way. Diggory's longing for what's good, Jadis's corruption, Aslan's song. They're not just fairy tale moments, but deep truths about the universe. Well, in our next episode, we're coming to the end of the Chronicles with the last battle, and this is gonna call us to go further up and further in. Until then, may you May you hear the music of creation. May you resist the whispers of temptation. And may we all trust the Lion who sings the world into life.