Commemorating the 50th anniversary of the death of CS Lewis, we have an excerpt from Chris Jensen's fascinating article "Shine as the Sun:  CS Lewis and the Doctrine of Deification", which appeared in Road to Emmaus (8:2; #29).  Click here to access the complete essay. 

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Deification, then, is bound up with Lewis' abiding appreciation of myth and poetry.  Although Lewis' love for myth is most often remembered in terms of how he saw pagan myths prefiguring the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ (eg. Balder, Adonis, or Bacchus, the myths which later became "fact" in the Second Person of the Trinity), it's equally true that Lewis saw in mythology a type of our resurrected life as well.  Human participation in God, Lewis says, is something that the poets and the mythologies know all about.  In "The Weight of Glory", we are told that one of the reasons Lewis placed such high value on myth and poetry was because he saw in them an intimation of our divine destiny.  In the lovely falsehoods told in countless stories and poems, humans get married to gods, or west winds blow right into human souls.  These may be false as history, but they may be quite near the truth as prophecy insofar as one day humans may pass beyond nature into the source of beauty and power itself, eating at the tree of life and drinking from the fountain of joy.