the magicians nephew

The coming of the lawless one is by the activity of Satan with all power and false signs and wonders, and with all wicked deception for those who are perishing, because they refused to love the truth and so be saved. Therefore God sends them a strong delusion, so that they may believe what is false, in order that all may be condemned who did not believe the truth but had pleasure in unrighteousness.

2 Thessalonians 2:9-12

For what you see and hear depends a good deal on where you are standing: it also depends on what sort of person you are.

 —C.S. Lewis, The Magician’s Nephew

2 Thessalonians 2:9-12 describes the social and epistemic context in which the Antichrist assumes power and the whole world believes a delusion. By that I mean humanity will be prepared for his deceptions on a mass scale. But how? How is it possible for people the world over to give themselves up to a ruler with nothing but murder and violence in his heart? Similar questions have been asked of many nations and peoples who welcomed evil tyrants like Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao Zedong, and a host of others. These figures had loyal followers, many of whom were “decent” people at one point. These followers later found themselves guarding internment camps, managing gulags, or forcing children into ovens. How does this happen? It happens when we refuse to love the truth and begin to believe a lie.
Accurately grasping reality, that is, knowing the world as it is, hinges on two critical components. First, there must be knowledge. Knowledge involves having good reasons for believing something you take to be true. Simply believing something, no matter how sincerely, without any good reason for believing it, doesn’t mean you know it. There are significant implications for this claim, but for now, let’s just say that to have real knowledge you must have good reasons to believe the things you believe. But knowledge is not enough. Character matters. It turns out, without good character, the truth will be obscured and won’t benefit us. Without a certain kind of character our perceptions will be faulty at best and perverted at worst. Certain dispositions of the heart are necessary to know and apply the truth. But dispositions of the heart also filter reality.  Here one might ask, does our character prevent us from having knowledge? Or from using knowledge in a moral and godly way? This is a deep question and it’s not obvious that they are mutually exclusive. As will be seen, a depraved heart both keeps us from knowledge as well as misapplies the knowledge we have.
I think at a basic level, what I call character refers to our sincerest and most authentic selves. When I was a child, we would say character is who you are when no one is watching. We express our character principally in the objects of our love, and we love whatever we think is The Good, or the best possible thing to love. Often our character manifests itself in the form of our deepest affections or desires, so that to speak of good character refers to those affections and desires aimed at the right things in the right way.
Cultivating right affections for the right objects is the hard work behind proper formation. If my affections are disordered, then out of this disordered heart many evils and vices will grow. For example, if I confuse the wrong things for The Good—drugs, sex, greed, and violence—and respond by loving them, then I will cultivate all manner of evil in my life. The simple reason is that what we love colors how we see the world and affects what can be known. When we love the wrong things, every evil is possible. It comes as no surprise that history is littered with examples of unimaginable wickedness. History is our sad story of confused and perverted loves, from slavery to sex trafficking.
As it turns out, and more to the point, there are epistemic consequences for our disordered affections as well. “Epistemic” is just a fancy word to describe how we come to know things. When I say there are epistemic consequences for loving the wrong things—having a faulty character— I mean that some things in the world cannot be properly known unless they are properly loved. For example, it just isn’t possible for me to know my wife if I don’t love her. Personal relationships are the most obvious example of how a lack of proper affection can restrict the depth of our knowledge. We cannot know those whom we do not love. But disordered affections do more than limit relational knowledge. They also pervert our perception of reality and warp our capacity to know the truth.
There is an excellent example of this in C.S. Lewis’ The Magician’s Nephew. In that book, Lewis describes the creation of the magical land of Narnia. Uncle Andrew, his nephew Diggory, Diggory’s friend Polly, the evil Witch, and the Cabby with his horse Strawberry, all witness Aslan the Lion bring life to the unformed substance of Narnia. Aslan’s mode of creation is a beautiful song, one which is immediately attractive to the children and the Cabby. However, it is repellant and unbearable to the Witch and Uncle Andrew. Though everyone present hears the same song, not everyone appreciates the music. The narrative gives special attention to Uncle Andrew:

When the lion had first begun singing, long ago when it was still quite dark, he had realized that the noise was a song. And he had disliked the song very much. It made him think and feel things he did not want to think and feel. Then, when the sun rose and he saw that the singer was a Lion (“only a lion,” as he said to himself) he tried his hardest to make believe that it wasn't singing and never had been singing— only roaring as any lion might in a zoo in our own world. “Of course, it can't really have been singing,” he thought, “I must have imagined it. I’ve been letting my nerves get out of order. Who ever heard a lion singing?” And the longer and more beautiful the Lion sang, the harder Uncle Andrew tried to make himself believe he could hear nothing but roaring. Now the trouble about making yourself stupider than you really are is that you very often succeed. Uncle Andrew did. He soon could hear nothing but roaring in Aslan’s song.  (p.149-150)

If you’ve read the story, then you probably weren’t surprised by Uncle Andrew’s response. He’s a drunkard, a coward, lazy, and he takes advantage of his family. Furthermore, he’s greedy, selfish, and aligns himself with the wicked Witch. The story’s Narrator states emphatically why Uncle Andrew found the Lion’s song so disagreeable. “For what you see and hear depends a good deal on where you are standing: it also depends on what sort of person you are.” Uncle Andrew embodies a small, ugly soul with deeply maligned affections. He loves himself and nothing else, and because of this cannot love Aslan’s song. Uncle Andrew’s life of perverted affections leads him to reject the witness of creation all around him.
But rejecting the truth doesn’t end with no beliefs. Truth must be replaced by lies for the rejection to be complete. Uncle Andrew soon convinces himself that instead of singing the Lion is growling, until finally, “he couldn’t have heard anything else even if he wanted to” (p.150). Uncle Andrew has, in the words taken from Scripture above, “refused to love the truth” and instead taken “pleasure in unrighteousness.” While events from his perspective now seem to make sense—Lion’s don’t sing they growl— he has rejected the truth of what really is the case. He now lives in his own delusion— a world of his own making, full of growling Lions and savage beasts. Years of vice have altered his taste for The Good, cultivating a pallet accustomed to selfishness and pride, instead of truth and virtue. Thus, when presented with the beauty of the Lion’s song he finds it unbearable. Sadly, there’s no going back; the effects are permanent. Later, Diggory pleads with Aslan to save his Uncle, but Aslan can do nothing for him,  “He thinks great folly, child,” said Aslan “…and I cannot comfort him either; he has made himself unable to hear my voice. If I spoke to him, he would only hear growlings and roarings. Oh Adam’s sons, how cleverly you defend yourselves against all that might do you good!” (p.203) The problem isn’t that Aslan doesn’t want to help Uncle Andrew, but that Uncle Andrew has inoculated himself against the Truth.
Let’s recap for a second. Grasping reality depends on both knowledge and character. Knowledge refers to having good reasons for your beliefs, and character refers to the real person under your skin. You express your character, your authentic self, in what you love and how you love it. Disordered affections not only generate vice but warp your ability to possess knowledge. Uncle Andrew served as a mini test case for these reflections. We can go one step further.
The story doesn’t allow us to discern when Uncle Andrew had so corrupted his soul that he no longer desired the truth. Changes like this seem less a discreet moment and more a gradual transition. At some point along that spectrum Uncle Andrew had altered his heart even if when that decisive moment occurred is unclear. I imagine there was a point at which he looked down a fork in the road: to the left, the broad road of depravity and ruin, and to the right the narrow road which leads to life. At the outset, the distinction between the two seems marginal at best. When looking down either side, it’s not obvious how far the paths will eventually diverge and it can seem easy to go back if one has made a wrong turn. But the more one walks on the wrong road the harder it is to go back, until eventually there’s no desire to change course.  There’s a kind of echo to this transition when the Lion’s song becomes merely a growl. Uncle Andrew seemed to hear the song at one point until he couldn’t. But when did the change occur? There’s no telling.
Many people stand at their own proverbial fork in the road, thinking they have time to change their minds and get right with God, not realizing that every decision against a life of repentant faith advances in the wrong direction and cultivates the wrong affections. Traverse that road long enough and the idea of doubling back towards the truth becomes increasingly distasteful and progressively impossible, until all vestiges of proper affection are gone, truth is replaced with a lie, and reality is nothing but a delusion; they cannot hear the Lion’s song as anything but a growl. The consequences will be devastating. Applied to the Scripture passage above, God will simply turn people over to their deluded hearts since they refused to love the truth. I worry for those who think they have time to figure things out, as if the option is forever available. It might not be.
--Church of New Hope