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cs lewis

since c.s. lewis is being mentioned, i thought many of
you would be interested to know that follows in a
slate article.  ehem...

culturebox

What Lewis Wouldn't Do
When you take God out of Narnia, is there anything
left?
By Lauren Winner

Monday, June 18, 2001, at 4:00 p.m. PT


 
In his essay "On Three Ways of Writing for Children,"
C. S. Lewis enumerated "two good ways and one that is
generally a bad way" of creating children's
literature. To illustrate the latter, he recounted
reading a manuscript of a story about a magic machine
that a fairy had given to a child. "I had to tell the
author," wrote Lewis, "that I didn't much care for
that sort of thing. She replied 'No more do I, it
bores me to distraction. But it is what the modern
child wants.' " Better, Lewis argues, to start with
the question "What moral do I need?" and better still
"not to ask the questions themselves."

Fifty years later, Lewis is surely looking down from
heaven in horror. The New York Times recently reported
that his beloved "Chronicles of Narnia" series will
soon be supplemented by new, secularized installments;
HarperCollins plans to bring us, as the title of
Doreen Carvajal's article put it, "Narnia Without a
Christian Lion." All the Narnia books, new and old,
will be marketed aggressively, and according to a memo
obtained by the Times, "no attempt will be made to
correlate the stories to Christian imagery/theology."

If this is the case, the new books will differ quite
markedly from the originals. "The whole Narnian story
is about Christ," Lewis once wrote to a school-age
fan. "That is to say, I asked myself, 'Supposing that
there really was a world like Narnia and supposing it
had (like our world) gone wrong and supposing Christ
wanted to go into that world and save it (as He did
ours) what might have happened?' " Aslan the Lion, the
hero of the "Chronicles," dies, is resurrected, and
saves people with his blood. (Lewis figured Christ as
a lion because the lion is the king of the beasts, but
also because the Bible refers to Christ as the Lion of
Judah.) Other characters also recall figures from the
Bible or church history. In The Horse and His Boy, for
example, Bree the horse suffers from the heresy of
Docetism (the heresy, named after the Greek for "to
seem," that Jesus only appeared to be human and
suffer). Bree muses that when the other Talking Beasts
speak of Aslan as a lion, they must be speaking
metaphorically—"they only mean he's as strong as a
lion. ... If he was a lion he'd have four paws and a
tail, and Whiskers!" Aslan then appears to Bree and
shows him that he is a "true Beast," not only refuting
the Docetist heresy, but also recalling the risen
Jesus' appearance to Doubting Thomas in the Gospel of
John.

But Narnia's "Christian imagery" goes beyond a
sprinkling of biblical allusions; the entire story
line mirrors the Christian salvation story. The
Magician's Nephew tells the creation story and the way
evil seeped into Narnia; The Lion, the Witch, and the
Wardrobe tells of the crucifixion and resurrection of
Christ; Prince Caspian tells how right religion was
corrupted and then restored; and so on, until the
final volume, The Last Battle, where Ape (the
Antichrist) tries to take over Narnia, which leads to
Aslan's second coming. In addition to all the usual
challenges of attempting a sequel to a classic,
HarperCollins will have to figure out what it could
possibly add to such a complete, iconic tale. Will the
publishing house insert amusing anecdotes and preteen
adventures amid all the divine revelation?

In fact, this would be strange but not impossible.
Despite the series' heavily religious coding, it's far
from clear that most children decipher or even notice
it. I didn't when I read them in grammar school, and
neither did the Jewish and Hindu friends I polled. We
just thought we were reading a riveting tale, one in
which, as in so much children's literature, good
triumphs over evil and a hero brings on a utopian
reign of peace. Like all successful religious
allegories, Narnia can be read on many levels: The
Song of Songs can be either an erotic love poem or a
description of God's relationship with Israel; the
famous medireview unicorn tapestries tell both of the
capture and taming of a unicorn and of the death and
resurrection of Jesus.

Indeed, part of what makes the Narnia series endure is
its light touch. (The same goes for other children's
classics with Christian casts, such as Madeleine
L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time and J. R. R. Tolkien's The
Hobbit.) It's bittersweet to see Lewis' restraint, his
lack of preachiness, rewarded with an attempt to make
the denizens of Narnia as unchristian as, say, the
wizard named Harry Potter.




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