"Transposition" was delivered on May 28, 1944, in the chapel of Mansfield College, Oxford. Apparently, Lewis broke down in the middle of reading it and had to sit down before he could finish. I think it would be fair to say that it is the most profound piece of his thinking that I have read.
1. Perhaps the best way to slide into the sermon is to say that he is arguing against reductionism. But I also think he would be dissatisfied with that description. He is arguing for the transcendent. His basic tact, quite fascinating I think, is to note that the same visible "sign" can relate to more than one "signified" (102). He is using here the language of Ferdinand de Saussure.
So some instances of individuals speaking in tongues may just be gibberish, but many of us believe that on the Day of Pentecost something transcendent was happening, something truly spiritual. To put it a more convincing way to outsiders, the same acts can reflect both revenge and justice. The same vowel letter can reflect different sounds. The same sensation can reflect different emotions.
"Transposition occurs whenever the higher reproduces itself in the lower" (103).
2. What if there were a symphonic piece that was put into a purely piano piece. The person who had heard the symphony would know that the piano version was a reduced version, but the person who knew only the piano piece would not know this.
He gave a couple examples that were reminiscent of Plato's myth of the cave. It seems beyond question to me that he is a kind of Platonist (he uses the word archetype more than once). I'm also reminded that some of the Romantics, for whom I believe Lewis had great sympathies, considered themselves neo-Platonists.
One illustration is that of a Flatlander to whom you might try to explain three dimensions. He might say, "Isn't it very suspicious that all the shapes which you offer me as images or reflections of the solid ones turn out on inspection to be simply the old two-dimensional shapes of my own world as I have always known it?" (101).
Also, say a mother and son were in a dungeon, but he too young to remember the outside world (109-110). She, an artist, draws the outside world for him with a drawing pad and a box of pencils. She thinks he understands until, one day, she realizes that he actually thinks the outside world is made up of pencil marks.
The bottom line is that "spiritual things are spiritually discerned" (105). In other words, if you do not have an awareness of the spiritual, the world will inevitably seem materialistic.
3. There is something beyond a sign that signifies something. A picture of a sun or lamp, for example, can be seen because the sun or a lamp is shining on it. "Pictures are part of the visible world themselves and represent it only by being part of it" (102). This relationship, where the sign not only points arbitrarily to something but "the thing signified is really in a certain mode present" goes beyond the symbolical to what he would cal the "sacramental."
What he calls transposition is of this sort. "The heavenly bounties by Transposition are embodied during this life in our temporal existence (111).
4. He ends the sermon with four points. First, "transposition" is not development. It's not growing into the spiritual out of the material, like evolution. "The Spiritual reality... existed before there were any creatures who ate" (112). "Real landscapes enter into pictures" rather than real trees and grass grow out of pictures. This also feels a little Platonic on Lewis' lips, but it can be read in a non-Platonic way.
Point two has to do with the incarnation. Lewis has no problem with the words of the Athanasian Creed that the incarnation worked "not by conversion of the Godhead into flesh but by taking of Manhood into God" (113). His fourth point is similarly on the resurrection. We may feel with our senses the transcendant experience of the Spirit. Not entirely sure what he is getting at here.
Finally, his third point deals with the reductionist, the one who can see "all the facts but not the meaning" (113). He likens the materialist to a dog that can't understand pointing. "A finger is a finger to him, and that is all" (114).
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