Ward’s discussion can be heard in full here on Church Life Today, a podcast produced by the McGrath Institute for Church Life. The experience of breathing in the cosmological atmosphere is another way Lewis characterizes unity with God and another reason Ward claims to have “stumbled upon the secret, imaginative key” that binds The Chronicles together.

Lewis himself claimed that knowing God is a lot more like “breathing an atmosphere than learning a subject.” Breathing an atmosphere is particularly interesting language because of its strong association with the seven planets in medieval thought the planets were imagined as imminent elements of the atmosphere which were “breathed in” like fresh air. As Ward explains, “we literally cannot get outside God and treat him as if he were an object to be studied. It means immersion and immediate unity in God, not observation or analysis from a distant place of indifference. This experience is similar to what it means to know God. The atmosphere of Narnia changes both the Pevensey children and Lewis’s readers, who don’t just look at Narnia from afar, but plunge into it with full force. Indeed, the power of The Chronicles is Lewis’s ability bring readers inside the wonderland, to absorb them into a world that shapes their entire field of vision. Ward claims that The Chronicles imaginatively represent “enjoyment consciousness,” that is, the experience of being inside the thing, of being embraced by what Lewis calls “the beam of light.” Why does Lewis write in this implicit fashion? How is the reader affected by entering into an imaginary and mysterious world in which meaning is somewhat unclear? Of course, Lewis doesn’t come right out and tell us the secret to his books that would surely diminish the meaning and playfulness of the work. After his discovery, Ward spent the next year rereading The Chroni cles, finding references to medieval cosmology all over. Lewis assume the number seven refers to the seven deadly sins or the seven sacraments, Ward assures us that the number seven in The Chronicles of Narnia alludes to the planets, which Lewis regarded as “spiritual symbols of permanent value.” Ward stumbled upon this key while reading one of Lewis’s poems containing the line, “Jupiter brings about winter past and guilt forgiven.” In Ward's view, this is actually a pithy summary of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Michael Ward claims that the key to understanding the The Chronicles is the seven heavens of the medieval cosmos. However, Lewis's intention in employing the number seven is a mystery to most. The number seven appears frequently throughout the seven books of The Chronicles of Narnia.

The narnia chronicles