“So you felt that there were currents in the books that transcended any particular religion?”
“Absolutely. I still do.”
For Pam, then, it was indeed possible to see past “stained-glass and Sunday School associations” to the “real potency” of the Chronicle’s themes. However, in the process, she also saw right past the books’ Christianity, as well, something that Lewis apparently never anticipated. But if the wine and robes and cross of Christianity are, if not dispensable, then at least interchangeable with other motifs, as Lewis seemed to suggest, then so, perhaps, are the sacraments and even the Savior himself. Pam describes herself as a person with strong spiritual feelings, but says she has never developed an interest in any organized religion. She still occasionally revisits the Chronicles, and there she finds much that, as she puts it, “is almost subversive of Christianity. It may have some of the symbols in it, but there are concepts of relativity and alternative worlds that go past Christianity.”
It occurred to me that the vehemence of my own reaction to the Christian subtext in the Chronicles had to do with the fact that someone else had told me about them; would I have felt less duped and misused if I’d figured it out for myself, the way Pam had? Perhaps, but although I shared Pam’s longing for imaginative freedom in another, better place, we sought refuge from different things. For Narnia to be Christian was, in my eyes, a little like what philosophers call a “category error.” As far as I was concerned, one of the essential, constitutive qualities of Narnia was that it was not Christian. I was a fierce little dualist on this count. When I realized how wrong I’d been, I felt that I had to make a choice. If I wanted to keep Narnia, I’d have to submit to Christianity, and that I was not willing to do.
For other children who didn’t harbor the same insurrectionary urges as Pam and I, enlightenment came as less of a jolt. Jonathan Franzen recognized the Christian aspect of Narnia when he reread the books in high school. “I thought it was kind of cool,” he told me. “I wasn’t afraid of Christianity at all because I had this very benign experience with liberal, suburban Christianity in junior high and high school, so I was predisposed to find those metaphors.” He thinks his Christian education primed him to like the books: “the gestalt of the world, of Narnia, made sense to me because of going to Christian Sunday school.”
Of all the people I talked to, Tiffany Brown had the most remarkable history with Narnia and Christianity. She was the kind of child for whom the barriers between the inner and outer worlds are highly permeable. For her, the spirituality in Narnia seemed spun from the same fabric as a life spent playing in the woods of rural Oregon and going to church. “I don’t actually know when I realized that the Christian message of it was so literal,” she told me. At around ten, she had recognized the similarities between Aslan’s death in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and the Crucifixion, “and it was fine with me. I just thought, Well, this is what gods do.” Her Jesus existed on a continuum with Aslan — if not the same thing exactly, then the same kind of thing:
“Jesus Christ was great. He would talk to me. It wasn’t this one-way prayer. What I experienced was an actual being who would come and literally talk to me. He was very sweet and very soothing and comforting, which is a kind of presence that I needed at that time. But [he] was really funny, which I wasn’t expecting.”
“Your Jesus had a sense of humor? That would have been inconceivable to me.”
“Yeah, he liked to laugh, and he was a lot less serious than the Church would have had me think.”
When she was six years old, Tiffany was born again. She’d wandered into an after-school program run by what she describes as a “nondenominational group of people with some very sophisticated brainwashing techniques.” Nice ladies rolled out a felt board and told the children wonderful stories using little cutouts of characters in the Bible. “The first one that they told us was about Moses, and I thought it just rocked, that baby in the basket.” The children sang songs and were taught how to recite simple prayers while an adult held up colored cue cards; when she held up a black card, they repeated, “My heart was black with sin.” A red card signaled, “But Jesus’s blood … ,” and a white card, “… turned it white as snow.”
Tiffany’s newfound religious fervor eventually drew the rest of her “Sunday-go-to-church” family into fundamentalist Christianity. Except for her, they remain born-again Christians to this day. Around the same time, she fell in love with Narnia, which the adults around her saw as perfectly compatible with their faith. Lewis was a famous Christian, and his intentions with the Chronicles were frankly evangelical, so how could the books do any damage to Tiffany’s soul? Yet, ironically, Narnia led to Tiffany’s estrangement from her church.
There is a much-cited passage in The Last Battle, in which Emeth, a noble warrior of the Calormene people, describes meeting Aslan after the end of the world. At first he is terrified, since he knows this god of the Narnians is the enemy of the Calormene god, Tash, and he has worshipped Tash all his life. Then Aslan explains to him, “I take to me the services which thou hast done to him. For I and he are of such different kinds that no service which is vile can be done to me, and none which is not vile can be done to him. Therefore if any man swear by Tash and keep his oath for the oath’s sake, it is by me that he has truly sworn. And if any man do a cruelty in my name, then, though he says the name Aslan, it is Tash whom he serves, and by Tash his deed is accepted.”
This is one of the few overtly religious passages in the Chronicles, if by religion you mean explicitly pertaining to worship. Aslan may be the god of Narnia, but he has no churches, and requires no rites or sacraments. What he says to Emeth is consistent with how he has always treated the Narnians: if they behave ethically, generously, and kindly, then they are in his flock; he ordains no sacraments. Emeth isn’t going to be sent to Limbo because of an accident of birth or for abiding by the nominal faith of his fathers; his honorable life and honest heart have earned him a place in the Narnian version of heaven.
In our world, Christian churches do not agree that righteous thoughts and actions are enough to redeem a soul that hasn’t accepted Jesus Christ as its Savior. Some of Lewis’s more conservative Christian readers have found the Emeth passage unsettling; David Downing’s Into the Wardrobe: C. S. Lewis and the Narnia Chronicles is fairly representative. As is often the case in such books, Downing’s interpretations of Lewis’s fiction are mostly confined to exegesis, detailing how each aspect of the Chronicles illustrates and conforms to a preferred version of Christian doctrine. These writers tend to avoid discussing any aspects of Lewis’s work likely to raise doubts or reservations.
Downing is a bit more courageous than most, however, in his willingness to tackle the Emeth passage. He hastens to explain that Lewis is not embracing “universalism” (the belief that even the damned will eventually be reconciled with God) but “inclusivism.” Inclusivism, which has the advantage of coming with the endorsement of the evangelical superpreacher Billy Graham, addresses age-old worries about the “righteous heathen.” Good men and women born before the coming of Christ and anyone else who behaved virtuously but never had the opportunity to hear the Gospel during life, may also be admitted to heaven. (The new Catechism of the Catholic Church, the authoritative exposition of Catholic doctrine, published in the late 1990s, sanctions a similar concept called “baptism by desire.”)
Lewis himself explicitly disavowed universalism, but inclusivism, like Limbo, invites the kind of technical scrutiny that can itself lead to skepticism. Presumably someone who lives and dies in a place where Christianity is entirely unknown would be covered by this dispensation, but what about someone who heard a little bit about it, or who once came across a Bible at some point, but who didn’t know any other Christians and never bothered to investigate further? What about someone whose only exposure to Christianity came from people who misrepresented it? What about someone who believed that Jesus Christ was the son of God, but chose to belong to so
me irregular faith instead of one of the approved churches — a Catholic, say, or a Greek Orthodox communicant? What about someone who believes but refuses to belong to any church at all, and dies unbaptized?
Many Christian churches seem to be torn between their own claims for legitimacy as the one true way and Christianity’s general protestations of love for all mankind. These are complicated theological questions. Individual congregants, however, often don’t make subtle distinctions between concepts like universalism and inclusivism. The people in Tiffany’s church leaned toward exclusion, and this spelled trouble once her Christian education progressed beyond felt-board fairy tales and colored cards.
“If you had such a positive experience with Jesus,” I asked, “how did you wind up leaving the Church?”
“We got to the part where they explain that you have to be practicing Christianity in this particular way or you’re going to hell,” she replied. Tiffany had a Catholic friend. Was she going to hell? Yes. She liked to read her father’s copies of National Geographic, full of photographs of people who’d never heard of Jesus. Were they going to hell, too? Yes. “Someone in the fundamentalist camp, my mom or somebody at the church, was coming down on the side of, well, tough. If you worship some idol, some false god, you are going to hell. And one of the first things that I thought of was the people who live in Narnia. They couldn’t be going to hell. They’re in Narnia. And they have Aslan. And it would be evil for them to not believe in Aslan.”
“This was the very reason why you were brought to Narnia,” Aslan said, “that by knowing me here for a little, you may know me better there.” But the inversion of Aslan’s statement works, too: knowing him there also enables us to see where he isn’t in this world. Tiffany wasn’t seeing the spirit of Aslan in her church. “That was how I started understanding the idea of other cultures and other religions,” she said. “Because [Narnia] was so real to me. And possibly really real. I believed [Narnians] existed somewhere out there. And if my religion was going to say that all of those guys are doomed, then I didn’t want to have anything to do with it.”
Evangelicals have tried to make a patron saint out of Lewis, but the fit is an uneasy one. Fundamentalism is literalism, and Lewis was a profoundly metaphorical novelist. In real-world conversation, and in his theological writings, even he admitted that he could sometimes be dogmatic. Yet dogmatism was not his only, or even his primary trait. “The imaginative man in me,” he wrote in 1954, not long after finishing the Chronicles, “is older, more continuously operative, and in that sense more basic than either the religious writer or the critic.” The fact that Lewis thought he could retell the story of Jesus with a lion god, talking animals, and semihuman creatures from classical myths set in an imaginary country where the Bible doesn’t exist — all this militates against strict interpretation. If the Bible is word-for-word true, as fundamentalists insist, instead of a truth conveyed via poetry and legend, as more liberal-minded Christians view it, then it can’t be retold in any other way without being corrupted, lessened, defiled.
Introduce metaphor, symbol, and all the other indirect, eloquent tools of art, and you introduce uncertainty, wiggle room, differences of interpretation. Fundamentalism is like an allergic response to a world where what God really said and meant can be argued this way and that, and where the rules aren’t absolutely clear. Tiffany had no interest in making that sort of retreat from the world, and it was inevitable that she’d fall away from her church eventually. But what precipitated that departure was the power — and, depending on your point of view, the treachery — of Lewis’s art. Novels that were intended to bolster her faith wound up undercutting it. This happened partly because of a mistake — that is, Tiffany’s own childish literalism, which insisted on seeing the Narnians’ belief in Aslan as different from her fellow congregants’ belief in Jesus. Yet Tiffany was also correct, because the Christianity that Lewis seemed to espouse (and he is by no means consistent, even within the Chronicles) told her that what matters is the virtue of someone’s thoughts and actions, not the god he or she professes to serve.
I was tempted to see Tiffany’s story as a lot like my own; we both objected to the exclusiveness of our churches, and we both eventually left them. But unlike me, Tiffany has always had an affinity for mysticism and an intimate relationship with the spiritual; she is a believer by constitution, even if what she believes in has changed over the years. Her quarrel with her childhood religion was considered and principled (amazingly so, given her youth); mine was reflexive, like a kid thrashing her way out of an itchy sweater. Though we both detected the hypocrisy in churches that professed love on the one hand and on the other responded to any infraction with threats of eternal torment, for Tiffany this led to a lot of painful soul-searching. She would spend her teenage years “bopping in and out of Christianity and hating Christianity and then giving it another chance.” For me, the Church’s flaws just offered more reasons to get out of something I never really wanted to be part of in the first place.
Perhaps that’s why Tiffany — even in her twenties, when she’d come to see the religious symbolism in the Chronicles as “jarringly” obvious — never rejected them as vehemently as I did. Like Pam, she saw deeper, and she could detect the better side of Christian belief, the one that I refused to acknowledge in my determination to detach myself from my church. “I always thought of Narnia as being this benign thing,” Tiffany told me after she’d heard my story. “I don’t recall ever feeling that sense of betrayal. It was more like, ‘Oh, well, thanks for hooking me up with this kind, sweet metaphor for Christianity. Wouldn’t it be great if all Christians were like this?’”
Chapter Ten
Required Reading
C.S. Lewis lost his own faith sometime during what he calls, in Surprised by Joy, the “dark ages” of boyhood, between childhood and adolescence, when all seemed “greedy, cruel, noisy and prosaic.” He lists several causes. First, he had somehow gotten hung up on the idea that he had to “really think” about every prayer he said, which made praying a daily ordeal he became increasingly eager to jettison. Then there was what he describes as his “deeply ingrained pessimism.” This attitude was not, Lewis insists, a result of his mother’s early death, but rather a by-product of his thwarted and frustrating relationship to the physical world. He was hopelessly clumsy and had come to expect every object “to do what you did not want it to do.” He was no good at the sports that matter so much at school. And even though he’d learned to regard his father’s financial panics as overblown, the often gloomy mood at home completed the picture of a world too miserable and misbegotten to be the work of any respectable god.
At school, a kindly matron introduced him to “Occultism,” a hodgepodge of esoteric beliefs comprising Rosicrucianism, Theosophy, and Spiritualism — precursors to today’s New Age movement — then all the rage in England and Ireland. There was also a dandified, theater-loving young teacher, worshipped by Lewis and his schoolmates, who contributed to his atheism in some unspecified way; perhaps he made piety seem uncool. Above all, Lewis studied the classics; his schoolwork consisted predominantly of reading and translating Greek and Latin texts. This curriculum, typical for boys of the time, introduced him to the pagan religions of the ancients. However much his teachers revered the classical authors, they made it clear that they regarded Greek and Latin religious beliefs as a “farrago of nonsense.” Lewis was not the first nor would he be the last young person to find this scorn disconcerting; no one bothered to satisfactorily explain to him why his own religion should be exempt from the same scrutiny.
Education and skepticism do seem to go hand in hand; “critical thinking” is what most of us say we want schools to teach kids. At the same age that Lewis was wondering why Jehovah got more respect than Jupiter, I was learning that a story is not always what it appears to be. Some books carry messages — not just morals, those pat lessons offered by books like Elsie Dinsmore, but a new, submerged level of meaning, accessible only to
the initiated.
Finding that level of meaning is a skill most readers have to be taught, and American children of my generation learned how to do it by reading books like Animal Farm, Lord of the Flies, and A Separate Peace for school. This is a peculiar species of novel, as awkward and uncongenial as early adolescence itself. I wonder: Does any adult ever return with pleasure to the assigned reading of sixth grade? To Kill a Mockingbird may be the only exception. (I put The Catcher in the Rye in a different category. For years, and for all the obvious reasons, J. D. Salinger’s paean to youthful rebellion wasn’t included among the “serious” novels officially sanctioned by grammar school teachers. You can date the moment at which reading became officially considered endangered to the year when they got desperate enough to start assigning it.)
Animal Farm, the ur-book of this type, comes closer to a true allegory, really, than The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe; the fate of the farm animals who rebel against their human oppressors mirrors the rise and moral decay of the Soviet Union more closely than Lewis’s book follows the New Testament. Orwell’s fable is, like Lord of the Flies (another parable of ineradicable violence), deeply sunk in misanthropic gloom. That’s part of its allure for the kind of young reader who yearns to demonstrate his or her maturity; any book this depressing has to be very grown-up. At least, that’s what I thought.
Our teacher explained to us that Animal Farm was really about politics — about communist Russia, no less! — and I and the other bookish students discussed its deeper meanings with the thrilling awareness that we were being initiated into a province of adulthood. Maybe we didn’t fully understand what communism was, but anyone could recognize the way that power and hierarchy crept into Orwell’s ostensibly egalitarian animal society. By age twelve, almost every child has some experience of “fair” situations that are actually unjust; it’s not such a great leap from that to the idea that some animals are more equal than others.
Laura Miller Page 11
