The contrast with Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings is important here. The complex and dark narrative of The Lord of the Rings is about finding a master ring that rules the other rings—and then destroying it, because it turns out to be so dangerous and destructive. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia are about finding a master story that makes sense of all other stories—and then embracing that story with delight because of its power to give meaning and value to life. Yet Lewis’s narrative nevertheless subtly raises darker questions. Which story is the true story? Which stories are merely its shadows and echoes? And which are mere fabrications—tales spun to entrap and deceive?
At an early stage in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the four children begin to hear stories about the true origins and destiny of Narnia. Puzzled, they find they have to make decisions about which people and which stories are to be trusted. Is Narnia really the realm of the White Witch? Or is she a usurper, whose power will be broken when two Sons of Adam and two Daughters of Eve sit on the four thrones at Cair Paravel? Is Narnia really the realm of the mysterious Aslan, whose return is expected at any time?
Gradually, one narrative emerges as supremely plausible—the story of Aslan. Each individual story of Narnia turns out to be part of this greater narrative. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe hints at (and partially discloses) the big picture, expanded in the remainder of the Narnia series. This “grand narrative” of interlocking stories makes sense of the riddles the children see and experience around them. It allows the children to understand their experiences with a new clarity and depth, like a camera lens bringing a landscape into sharp focus.
Yet Lewis did not invent this Narnian narrative. He borrowed and adapted one that he already knew well, and had found to be true and trustworthy—the Christian narrative of Creation, Fall, redemption, and final consummation. Following his late-evening conversation with Tolkien and Dyson about Christianity as the true myth in September 1931, Lewis began to grasp the explanatory and imaginative power of an incarnational faith. As we saw (page 134), Lewis came to believe in Christianity partly because of the quality of its literary vision—its ability to give a faithful and realistic account of life. Lewis was thus drawn to Christianity not so much by the arguments in its favour, but by its compelling vision of reality, which he could not ignore—and, as events proved, could not resist.
The Chronicles of Narnia are an imaginative retelling of the Christian grand narrative, fleshed out with ideas Lewis absorbed from the Christian literary tradition. The basic theological themes that Lewis set out in Mere Christianity are transposed to their original narrative forms in Narnia, allowing the deep structure of the world to be seen with clarity and brilliance: a good and beautiful creation is spoiled and ruined by a fall, in which the creator’s power is denied and usurped. The creator then enters into the creation to break the power of the usurper, and restore things through a redemptive sacrifice. Yet even after the coming of the redeemer, the struggle against sin and evil continues, and will not be ended until the final restoration and transformation of all things. This Christian metanarrative—which early Christian writers called the “economy of salvation”—provides both a narrative framework and a theological underpinning to the multiple stories woven together in Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia.
Lewis’s remarkable achievement in the Chronicles of Narnia is to allow his readers to inhabit this metanarrative—to get inside the story, and feel what it is like to be part of it. Mere Christianity allows us to understand Christian ideas; the Narnia stories allow us to step inside and experience the Christian story, and to judge it by its ability to make sense of things, and “chime in” with our deepest intuitions about truth, beauty, and goodness. If the series is read in the order of publication, the reader enters this narrative in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, which concerns the coming—technically the “advent”—of the redeemer. The Magician’s Nephew deals with the narrative of creation and fall, while The Last Battle concerns the ending of the old order, and the advent of a new creation.
The remaining four novels (Prince Caspian, The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader,” The Horse and His Boy, and The Silver Chair) deal with the period between these two advents. Lewis here explores the life of faith, lived in the tension between the past and future comings of Aslan. Aslan is now at one and the same time an object of memory and of hope. Lewis speaks of an exquisite longing for Aslan, when he cannot be seen clearly; of a robust yet gracious faith, able to withstand cynicism and skepticism; of people of character who walk trustingly through the shadowlands, seeing “in a mirror darkly” and learning to deal with a world in which they are assaulted by evil and doubt.
The Screwtape Letters brought a fresh perspective to the Christian’s struggles with temptation and doubt through its ingenious narrative framework of a master devil and his apprentice (page 217). The Chronicles of Narnia have a far greater scope and reach, using an imaginatively transposed version of the Christian narrative to enable its readers to understand and cope with the ambiguities and challenges of the life of faith. An imaginative engagement with Narnia prepares the way for, and helps give rise to, a more reasoned and mature internalization of the Christian grand narrative. Rarely has a work of literature combined such narrative power, spiritual discernment, and pedagogical wisdom.
In the following chapter, we shall both explore some rooms and open a few windows, focussing especially on the first and, in my estimation, best of the Narnia works—The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
CHAPTER 12
Narnia: Exploring an Imaginative World
There are two main ways of exploring the Chronicles of Narnia. One—the easier, and by far the more natural—involves thinking of the individual novels as rooms in a house. We stroll around the rooms and their contents, enjoying working out how they are connected by corridors and doors. We are like tourists, wandering around a new town or country, taking in the sights and enjoying ourselves. And there is nothing wrong with this. Narnia, like any rich landscape, is worth exploring and getting to know. And, like most tourists, we might take a map of Narnia with us to help us make sense of what we see.
Yet there is a second way of reading the Narnian novels, which involves the imagination as the primary organ of investigation. This second way does not invalidate the first, but builds upon it and takes it further. Once more, we think of the Narnian novels as rooms in a house. Once more, we wander around the house, taking everything in. But we realise that the rooms in this house have windows. And when we look through them, we see things in a new way. We can see farther than before, as the landscape opens up in front of us. And what we come to see is not an accumulation of individual facts, but the bigger picture which underlies them. When seen in this way, our imaginative experience of Narnia enlarges our sense of reality. Living in our own world feels different afterwards.
12.1 “Map of Narnia,” drawn by Pauline Baynes.
Exploring Narnia is thus not just about encountering this strange and wonderful land; it is also about allowing it to shape the way we see our own land and our own lives. To use Lewis’s way of speaking, we can see Narnia as a spectacle, something to be studied in its own right, or we can see it—whether additionally or alternatively—as a pair of spectacles, something that makes it possible to see everything else in a new way, as things are brought into sharp focus. The story captivates us, making us see things its way—setting to one side the ordinary, and seeing the extraordinary instead.
So let us enter the world of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and explore both that strange place and the new ways of seeing things that it makes possible. And where better to begin than with its central character, the magnificent lion Aslan?
Aslan: The Heart’s Desire
How did Lewis develop the idea and image of a noble lion as his central character? Lewis himself seems to disclaim any privileged insight here. He once remarked, “I don’t know where the Lion came from or why He came. But once He was there He pulled the whole
story together.” It is not, however, difficult to suggest possible explanations of how Aslan came “bounding into” Lewis’s imagination.593 Lewis’s close friend Charles Williams had written a novel titled The Place of the Lion (1931), which Lewis had read with interest, clearly appreciating how the image could be developed further.
The use of the image of a lion as a central character made perfect literary and theological sense to Lewis. A lion was already used widely in the Christian theological tradition as an image of Christ, following the New Testament’s reference to Christ as the “Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David” (Revelation 5:5). Furthermore, a lion is the traditional symbol associated with Lewis’s childhood church, St. Mark’s Anglican Church in Dundela, located on the outskirts of Belfast. The church’s rectory, which Lewis visited regularly as a child, had a door knocker in the form of a lion’s head. The use of the image of a lion is relatively easy to understand. But what about the lion’s name?
Lewis came across the specific name Aslan in the notes to Edward Lane’s translation of the Arabian Nights (1838). The name Aslan is particularly significant in Ottoman colonial history. Until the end of the First World War, Turkey was an imperial power, exercising considerable political and economic influence in many parts of the Middle East. Although Lewis links his discovery of the term with the Arabian Nights, it is entirely possible that he also came to know of it through Richard Davenport’s classic study of 1838, The Life of Ali Pasha, of Tepeleni, Vizier of Epirus: Surnamed Aslan, or the Lion. Davenport had earlier published an important life of Edmund Spenser (1822), which Lewis would have encountered while researching the poet. This Ottoman lineage explains how Lewis came to use the Turkish name “Aslan” for his great lion. “It is the Turkish for Lion. I pronounce it Ass-lan myself. And of course I meant the Lion of Judah.”594
The most characteristic feature of Lewis’s Aslan is that he evokes awe and wonder. Lewis develops this theme with relation to Aslan by emphasising the fact that he is wild—an awe-inspiring, magnificent creature, which has not been tamed through domestication, or had his claws pulled out to ensure he is powerless. As the Beaver whispers to the children, “He’s wild, you know. Not like a tame lion.”595
To understand the literary force of Lewis’s depiction of Aslan, we need to appreciate the importance of Lewis’s early reading of Rudolf Otto’s classic religious work The Idea of the Holy (1923). This work, which Lewis first read in 1936 and regularly identified as one of the most important books he had ever read,596 persuaded him of the importance of the “numinous”—a mysterious and awe-inspiring quality of certain things or beings, real or imagined, which Lewis described as seemingly “lit by a light from beyond the world.”597
Lewis devotes a substantial part of the opening chapter of The Problem of Pain to an analysis of Otto’s idea, and offers one specific literary illustration of its importance.598 Lewis notes the passage in Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows (1908) in which Rat and Mole approach Pan:
“Rat!” [Mole] found breath to whisper, shaking, “Are you afraid?”
“Afraid?” murmured the Rat, his eyes shining with unutterable love. “Afraid? Of HIM? O never, never! And yet—and yet— O Mole, I am afraid!”599
This passage deserves to be read in full, as it had clearly influenced Lewis’s depiction of the impact of Aslan on the children and animals in Narnia. For example, Grahame speaks of Mole’s experiencing “an awe that smote and held him and, without seeing, he knew it could only mean that some august Presence was very, very near.”600
Otto’s account of numinous experience identifies two distinct themes: a mysterium tremendum, a sense of mystery which evokes fear and trembling; and mysterium fascinans, a mystery which fascinates and attracts. The numinous, for Otto, can thus terrify or energise, giving rise to a sense of either fear or delight, as suggested in Grahame’s dialogue. Other writers reframed the idea in terms of a “nostalgia for paradise,” which evokes an overwhelming sense of belonging elsewhere.
In describing the reaction of the children to the Beaver’s softly whispered confidence that “Aslan is on the move—perhaps has already landed,” Lewis offers one of the finest literary statements of the impact of the numinous:
And now a very curious thing happened. None of the children knew who Aslan was any more than you do; but the moment the Beaver had spoken these words everyone felt quite different. Perhaps it has sometimes happened to you in a dream that someone says something which you don’t understand but in the dream it feels as if it had some enormous meaning—either a terrifying one which turns the whole dream into a nightmare or else a lovely meaning too lovely to put into words, which makes the dream so beautiful that you remember it all your life and are always wishing you could get into that dream again. It was like that now. At the name of Aslan each one of the children felt something jump in its inside.601
Lewis then describes how this “numinous” reality impacts each of the four children in a quite different manner. For some, it evokes fear and trembling; for others, a sense of unutterable love and longing:
Edmund felt a sensation of mysterious horror. Peter felt suddenly brave and adventurous. Susan felt as if some delicious smell or some delightful strain of music had just floated by her. And Lucy got the feeling you have when you wake up in the morning and realize that it is the beginning of the holidays or the beginning of summer.602
Susan’s thoughts are clearly based on Lewis’s classic analysis of “longing,” found especially in his 1941 sermon “The Weight of Glory,” which speaks of this desire as “the scent of a flower we have not found” or “the echo of a tune we have not heard.”603
Lewis is here setting out, in a preliminary yet still powerful form, his core theme of Aslan as the heart’s desire. Aslan evokes wonder, awe, and an “unutterable love.” Even the name Aslan speaks to the depths of the soul. What would it be like to meet him? Lewis captures this complex sense of awe mingled with longing in the reaction of Peter to the Beaver’s declarations about this magnificent lion, who is “the King of the wood and the son of the great Emperor-beyond-the-Sea.” “‘I’m longing to see him,’ said Peter, ‘even if I do feel frightened.’”604
Lewis here transposes one of the central themes of works such as Mere Christianity into an imaginative mode. There is indeed a deep emptiness within human nature, a longing which none but God can satisfy. Using Aslan as God’s proxy, Lewis constructs a narrative of yearning and wistfulness, tinged with the hope of ultimate fulfilment. That this is no misguided strategy is strongly suggested by a powerful passage in the writings of Bertrand Russell (1872–1970), easily one of the most articulate and influential British atheist writers of the twentieth century:
The centre of me is always and eternally a terrible pain . . . a searching for something beyond what the world contains, something transfigured and infinite. The beatific vision—God. I do not find it, I do not think it is to be found—but the love of it is my life. . . . It is the actual spring of life within me.605
When, towards the end of The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader,” Lucy piteously declares that she cannot bear to be separated from Aslan, she echoes this theme of the longing of the human heart for God. If she and Edmund return to their own country, they fear they will never see Aslan again.
“It isn’t Narnia, you know,” sobbed Lucy. “It’s you. We shan’t meet you there. And how can we live, never meeting you?”
“But you shall meet me, dear one,” said Aslan.
“Are—are you there too, Sir?” said Edmund.
“I am,” said Aslan. “But there I have another name. You must learn to know me by that name. This was the very reason why you were brought to Narnia, that by knowing me here for a little, you may know me better there.”606
In using Aslan as a figure or type of Christ, Lewis stands within a long and continuing tradition of Christ figures in literature and film, such as Santiago, the “Old Man” in Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea (1952).607 Such
Christ figures are found in literature of all genres, including children’s books. The phenomenally successful Harry Potter series of novels incorporates a number of such themes. Gandalf is one of a number of Christ figures within Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, whose Christological role and associations are accentuated in Peter Jackson’s recent film version of the epic series.608
Lewis develops many of the classic Christological statements of the New Testament in the Chronicles of Narnia, generally focussing these on the person of Aslan. Yet perhaps his most intriguing reworking of a classic theological theme concerns his depiction of the death and resurrection of Aslan in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. So what does Lewis understand by atonement?
The Deeper Magic: Atonement in Narnia
One major theme in Christian theological reflection concerns how the death of Christ on the cross is to be interpreted, especially in relation to the salvation of humanity. These ways of interpreting the Cross, traditionally referred to as “theories of the Atonement,” have played a major role in Christian discussion and debate through the ages. Lewis positions his account of the death of Aslan at the hands of the White Witch within the context of this stream of thinking. But what ideas does Lewis himself develop?
Before considering this question, we need to appreciate that Lewis was not a professional theologian, and did not have any expert knowledge of the historical debates within the Christian tradition on this question. While some have tried to relate Lewis to, for example, the medieval debate between Anselm of Canterbury and Peter Abelard, this is not a particularly profitable approach. Lewis tends to know theological ideas through their literary embodiments. It is therefore not to professional theologians that we must turn to explore Lewis’s ideas on the Atonement, but to the English literary tradition—to works such as Piers Plowman, John Milton’s Paradise Lost, or the medieval mystery plays. It is here that we will find the approaches that Lewis weaves into his Narnian narrative.
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