A meditation for Good Friday.
A little boy was playing with his crayons.
"What are you drawing a picture of?"
"God."
"But surely, no-one knows what God looks like."
"They will once I've finished my picture."
Thursday, April 17, 2025
5: About a decade ago, we had a very serious conversation about whether or not the Silver Surfer has a willy.
About a decade ago, we had a serious conversation about whether or not the Silver Surfer has a willy. The answer, you will recall, was “Up to Fantastic Four #70, no; after Silver Surfer issue #1, yes.
In Stan Lee’s inferior reworking of Jack Kirby’s Silver Surfer, the Christ-like herald of Galactus is revealed to be an alien hippy named Norrin Radd, who sacrificed his humanity in to order save his planet from the space-god’s wrath. The exiled super-hero spends page after page pining for Shalla Bal, his one true love who had to remain on his home planet of Zenn-La.
The forthcoming and extremely promising Fantastic Four movie appears to have swapped the characters, so that Shalla Bal is the exiled Surfer and Norrin Radd the boy she left behind. It is far from obvious that this switcheroo would significantly affect the story. There is a minor subplot when Ben Grimm erroneously comes to the conclusion that the Surfer is hitting on his girlfriend Alicia; much, much later Dan Slott wrote a limited series in which the Surfer had a dalliance with a human woman named Dawn. Neither plot is central to the original Galactus saga. If you are adapting 1950s and 1960s comic books, there is always going to be a dearth of interesting female characters in the source material, and a bit of judicious gender swapping is a perfectly sensible idea.
But I must admit that when I heard about the Silver Surferette, my first thought was “Oh dear. That is really a bit you know, obvious.”
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4:If your school still had religious assemblies, you probably puzzled your way through Cardinal Newman’s Dream of Gerontius...
If your school still had religious assemblies, you probably puzzled your way through Cardinal Newman’s Dream of Gerontius, which worked its way into hymnbooks as Praise to the Holiest in the Height.
O wisest love! that flesh and blood
Which did in Adam fail,
Should strive afresh against the foe,
Should strive and should prevail.
And that a higher gift than grace
Should flesh and blood refine,
God’s presence, and His very self
And essence all-divine.
Evangelicals are prone to reduce the whole of Christianity to the single proposition that Jesus was punished on the Cross for the transgressions of the human race: but the hymn asserts that human nature was change by the very fact of its being amalgamated with divine nature. A sentimental modern “chorus” has a jolly good go at putting across the same concept “Lord of infinity/stooping so tenderly/lifts our humanity/to the height of his throne.” The Athanasian Creed, which is I think still in the Anglican prayer book, says that although Jesus was both God and Man “yet he is not two, but one Christ; One, not by conversion of the Godhead into flesh: but by taking of the Manhood into God”.
Lewis, in Mere Christianity, uses a vividly concrete image to explain the idea. Imagine that you could see the human race from an extra-temporal perspective, he says. Then the human race would appear, less as a collection of distinct individuals, more as a very complicated tree. Each branch of the tree would be a human life; long or short as the case may be; growing out of his father and mother and perhaps with children growing out of it. [I wonder if he was thinking of Robert Heinlien’s Lifeline when he wrote the passage?] If Christianity is true then somewhere in the middle of that vast four dimensional spider-web is one human life which is also the life of God: and the presence of that divine life changes the totality.
“It is as if something which is always affecting the whole human mass begins, at one point, to affect the whole human mass in a new way. From that point the effect spreads through all mankind. It makes a difference to people who lived before Christ as well as to people who lived after Him. It makes a difference to people who have never heard of Him. It is like dropping into a glass of water one drop of something which gives a new taste or a new colour to the whole lot.”
This is a drawback to anyone who sees interplanetary missionary work as a theoretical possibility. If God specifically saved humanity by taking on a specifically human nature, then it is hard to see that he also redeemed Venusian nature or Kaled nature.
So what does it mean to suppose or conjecture that Jesus took on the body of a Lion in another world or another universe? Are Peter and Lucy Kings and Queens of Narnia by virtue of Aslan dying on the Stone Table, or by virtue of Jesus having once shared their nature? Can God save mouse-nature or donkey-nature by amalgamating himself with lion-nature? Is it quite decent to even contemplate the question?
“But Andrew: these are not questions which would reasonably occur to anyone reading a fairy story; and they are not questions which Lewis himself was particularly interested in. The average occupant of the average pew has probably never heard of the Athanasian Creed, although they may have sung Meekness and Majesty. Can’t you just let a fairy story be a fairy story?”
I agree: these are not sensible questions. We don’t read Puss in Boots and ask whether a cat’s vocal chords could really produce human speech; we don’t watch Tom and Jerry and wonder about the physics and biology of a universe in which domestic animals can survive being physically flattened by anvils. It would not occur to me to ask such questions: unless reactionary Christians had started pre-emptively damning an unmade movie on the grounds that a famous actress will be speaking the words of an animated Lion.
Unless, that is, there were people who were okay with Jesus being a Cat but not okay with Jesus being a woman.
People who, would, I assume, want to change Sidney Carter’s cosmic hymn so it says
who can tell what other body
he may hallow for his own
but it will definitely be a man’s body
because that’s the only one in which he would feel at home.
And who would amend Johnny Mathis to “waiting for one child: black, white, yellow, no-one knows, but one thing they do know, it will definitely be a boy.”
People who think that Jesus’ humanity is inessential, but that his masculinity is indispensable.
That God is irreducibly male and that Christianity represents the belief that the universe is governed by the male principle. [*]
I am reminded of the old joke about the Jewish atheist who visits Belfast during the Troubles, and is asked whether he is a Catholic Jewish Atheist or a Protestant Jewish Atheist?
“Is it bad theology to imagine that the Christian story might have happened on a planet of super intelligent asexual amoebas?”
“It depends. Are they boy super-intelligent asexual amoebas or girl super-intelligent asexual amoebas.”
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* This is not actually what they are saying, of course. What they are actually saying is that they hate on trans people, and that the pretend cat with the female voice can be drawn into their whining conspiracy theory.
3: There has been a good deal of fuss about the rumour — which is still only a rumour at time of writing — that Meryl Streep has been cast as the voice of Aslan in the forthcoming Netflicks adaptation of the Narnia saga.
There has been a good deal of fuss about the rumour — which is still only a rumour at time of writing — that Meryl Streep has been cast as the voice of Aslan in the forthcoming Netflicks adaptation of the Narnia saga. CS Lewis describes Aslan’s voice as deep and resonant, which are not necessarily the first words which come to mind when you think of the star of Kramer vs Kramer, although she did do a pretty good turn as Margaret Thatcher. But it is perfectly possible that Greta Gerwig thinks that an incredibly fierce CGI lion who speaks with a relatively soft, feminine voice would convey exactly the otherworldliness that Lewis’s Aslan ought to have. By no means can we infer that the director has unilaterally declared that Aslan is a lioness.
But what if she had?
Well, when Lewis goes looking for an analogy for the Crown of Thorns, he has the Witch shave off Aslan’s mane; which doesn’t work if They are a Lioness. And the scene in which the two girls romp through Narnia on the Lion’s back would, I think, have a slightly different emotional resonance if they were riding a Lioness. Unless, of course, Lucy and Susan are going to become Lucius and Simon; but that would spoil the analogy between the Pevensie girls and the women who went to the tomb of Jesus on Easter morning. I must admit that the idea of Simon becoming obsessed with Levis, Lynx and night-club passes has a certain charm. Would we then have to say that Petra receives the Magic Sword from Mother Christmas? Or are swords purely male symbols, in which case she would get the healing potion. It’s complicated.
None of this is uninteresting. Switching a character’s gender is a good way of interrogating how gender works in your story. Helen Mirren is obviously correct to say that the James Bond franchise is built on sexism; but that is one of the things which might make a female 007 and interesting proposition. Asking “What if Bond were a girl?” could illuminate the character, in a way that getting Anthony Horowitz or someone to flesh out another spy story out of Ian Fleming’s waste paper basket might not. (Should we imagine a Jane Bond who flirts with Master Moneypenny and gives Willy Galore a slap on the arse for interfering in woman-talk?) But perhaps we don’t want an action packed spy-thriller to be either interesting or illuminating?
Some people think that “respect” for the author demands absolute, literal fidelity to his work. “Adaptation” is simply a matter of transmuting the authorial words into moving pictures. A sufficiently perfect adaptation would give the person who has only seen the film precisely the same experience as the person who has only read the book. And, indeed, it has been said that some very popular novelists — Dan Brown and John Grisham, perhaps — compose “novels” which are no-more than descriptions of films, which readers then bring to life in their heads. And if you take this view, then to change the colour of a character’s hair or the timbre of their voice is to posthumously insult the writer and alienate the entire fan-base. Comic book fans are already in high dudgeon because it appears that in the new Fantastic Four movie, Mister Fantastic will have acquired an entirely non-canonical moustache.
But some of us feel that adaptation is much more akin to translation. If a modern poet says he is going to translate Gawain and the Green Knight into modern English, I don’t say “Well, hopefully, this time he will get it right and no-one will ever have to do another translation ever again.” I say “I am certainly looking forward to finding out how this particular writer, with the particular writer’s unique experience, creates a new poem based from the medieval source.”
But some people go a lot further than this. Their problem is not just that bringing new ideas to an adaptation is an insult to CS Lewis. They think that saying that Aslan is, or might have been, a female Lion is the same as saying that Jesus is, or could have been, a female human, and therefore that God is, or could be, a female deity. And this, they think, is a calculated affront to Christianity.
Now, for all I know, it may in fact be a calculated affront to Christianity. Greta Gerwig is nothing if not iconoclastic. Barbie was an unashamed celebration of all things pink; but it was also an unsubtle attack on the stereotyped notions of femininity that pink toys arguably promulgate. It would not be at all surprising if her Narnia movies both celebrate and subvert their subject matter: a faithful and inspirational cinematic recreation of a cherished Christian allegory which also stuck two fingers up at the patriarchal conception of God. And that could be done well or badly: it could be interesting or it could be boring. If I heard that someone was translating Sir Gawain and the Green Knight into the language of hip-hop I wouldn’t say “That’s an insult to the author, to King Arthur, and to everyone who has ever studied medieval literature.” I would say “Weird idea. I’ll look forward to finding out how it works." [*]
There should be no possible objection to the use of the Lioness as symbol of Jesus. All sorts of things have been used as symbols of Jesus: unicorns and shamrocks and lumps of rock. Medieval allegorists said he was like a mother pelican, because the mother pelican will peck at her own chest to feed her chicks. Jesus compared himself with a mother hen. (And also to a burglar.) In the book of Proverbs the Divine Wisdom uses female pronouns. There is even (I have read) a tradition of depicting the wound in Christ’s side as a woman’s vulva.
It only becomes a problem when you insist on the latter Narnia books and sat that Aslan is the [Son] of God, incarnated in the body of Lioness; just as Jesus was the [Son] of God incarnated in the body of male Jewish artisan. This clearly gets us into an absolute buffer zone between orthodoxy and heresy: even discussing it feels vaguely indecent. [*]
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[*] Yo—way back when crowns were claimed with steel,
Kings rode deep, swords flashin’ like they real.
Legends born in the grime of the field,
Blood wrote truth, no fake, no shield.
From Troy’s fall came a fire, a new breed rose,
Rome got built, then Britain froze—
Cold land, brave hearts, story unfolds,
Where Arthur sits, and the Green Knight rolls.
[** ] It took the Church about a hundred and twenty five years (from 325 to 451) to decide what it meant for the Son of God to “become” a man. The answer could arguably be summarised as “he just did, okay?” It had taken the best part of three centuries, from the Crucifixion to the council of Nicea, to establish exactly what was meant by “Son of God”.
2: In 1948 C.S Lewis wrote an essay about women's ordination, or as he very provocatively put it, priestesses in the church .
In 1948, Lewis wrote an essay about women’s ordination, or, as he very provocatively put it, Priestesses In the Church. Anglicanism is a very broad Church, and presumably some clergymen do see themselves as Priests in a Catholic sect that has temporarily split with Rome; but others are thorough-going Lutherans who believe in a Priesthood of All Believers. Lewis’s objection to lady vicars was not based on pure sexism: he specifically says that a woman can be as learned, pious and zealous as a man; and will probably be better at specifically pastoral duties. But he is sufficiently High Church to think that, during Mass, the Priest represents God to the congregation. To say that a Priestess can represent God as well a Priest is to imply that we might just as well think of God the Mother as God the Father.
I used to think this was a valid argument: I used to enjoy making the smart-alec point that the Church of England should not have female Priests because, as a Protestant church, it should not have Priests at all. I no longer think that Lewis was right on the purely procedural point: lady clergy do not particularly imply a lady God. At any rate, thirty years since the first clergywoman and a decade since the first female bishop, no-one is showing the slightest sign of talking in terms of God the Mother, God the Daughter and God the Holy Ghostess. But I do take is point about imagery: the language you use to talk about God both reflects and determines your beliefs about Them. “A child that had been taught to pray to God the Mother” he says “Would have a different religious life to a Christian child.”
Shortly before his death, Lewis was asked to comment on a very silly book by the then Bishop of Woolwich, JAT Robinson. (In private, Lewis used to refer to him as the Bishop of Woolworths.) Robinson had argued that earlier generations had seamlessly replaced the idea of a God “up there” with that of a God “out there”: it was now time to replace “God out there” with “God down here”. Robinson clearly means that we should replace the idea of a God who exists with one who doesn’t: “God down here” is simply his figure of speech. But Lewis tactically misunderstands him. He suggests that Robinson was really saying no more than “Religions of the Earth-Mother have hitherto been spiritually inferior to those of the Sky-Father, but perhaps it is now time to readmit some of their elements.”
Lewis said that if he would be prepared to defend the proposition, although he wouldn’t believe it very strongly.
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1: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is an allegory....
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is an allegory. Aslan is both a character in a fairy tale, and a symbol of the Christian Christ. In some ways, he is an analogy: Aslan is to Edmund as Jesus is to the human race; and he is to the White Witch as Jesus is to Satan. He resembles Christ is some respects, but not others: like Jesus he dies and rises again, and like Jesus he arrives at the same time as Father Christmas; but there is (so far as we know) no stable, no carpenter’s shop, and no Virgin Mother. Aslan is no secret messiah, his glory is by no means veiled.
As the series progresses, Aslan ceases to be a mere symbol or allegory and becomes literally the Son of God. He is present both on Earth and in Narnia, but on Earth he has a different name; when the children enter his Kingdom at the end of the last book, he no longer appears as a Lion. Lewis comes to prefer the term “supposition” to allegory: the completed series asks “What if there were worlds other than Earth; and what if the Second Person of the Trinity were incarnated in one of those worlds—what might that look like?”
Is this presumptuous? Any religious drama, whether the Chosen or Life of Brian creates a fictional Jesus: so does every painted icon and every stained glass window. And Christians don’t generally have a problem with using their imagination. The old Sunday School hymn asks us to imagine that we were one of the children who Jesus blessed. St Ignatius teaches a form of meditation in which his monks were supposed to imagine that they were participants in the great Bible stories — letting their imaginations run wild and creating the scenes in as much depth as they could.
But Lewis’s theological supposition goes a good deal beyond historical fiction. He is not asking us to imagine the colour of Jesus’s eyes, or how many teapots there were in Mary’s kitchen. He is asking us to pretend that God interacted with the Universe in a way which, so far as we know, he didn’t; to imagine a story of sin and redemption quite different from the one that his church has historically taught.
I recall going to one of those down-with-the-kids carol services in the 1970s. I remember singing a Sydney Carter hymn: “Who can say how many mangers, far above the Milky Way / still may rock the King of Glory/ on another Christmas Day.” And I remember a choir, possibly consisting of Girl Guides, singing “When a Child Is Born” by Johnny Mathis, without any apparent sense of irony or incongruity. “And all this will happen because the world is waiting for one child — black, white, yellow, no on knows — but a child that will grow up and turn tears to laughter.”
Christ reincarnated in our present world; Christ endlessly incarnated on millions of other planets. These are hardly orthodox Christian teachings, but no-one seemed to notice.
There is a scene in the excellent BBC sit-com Rev in which the sincere but inadequate Rev Smallbone interacts with a homeless man, and subsequently tells the Bishop that he has met God. And that is the sort of thing that sort of Clergyman often says. You can find God everywhere, in anyone: perhaps especially in the most unlikely people. “And in the eyes of the broken I thought I saw your face.” But “God is in everyone: in Jesus, for example” is not what Christians are talking about when they talk about the incarnation.
Could there have been other Incarnations is a momentous question; but it is one that might occur to any thinking Christian. Lewis’s theological “supposition” is really only scaffolding to prop up what is still primarily a metaphor. The Narnia stories are stories, vividly using the fairy-tale setting to illustrate religious and moral points which apply to this world. In Mere Christianity, he illustrated the distinction between “making” and “begetting” by saying that the human race is like a box of toy soldiers who have heard a rumour that some of them are some day going to come to life. This metaphor takes on a narrative form in the fairy tale: when the White Witch is defeated, the statues in her ice-palace do indeed come to life. The end of the Long Winter is a fine, poetic picture of salvation and regeneration as Lewis understood them. But this pictorial element is rather spoiled when we are retrospectively told that “always winter but never Christmas” is a form that the Fall might have taken in a real (albeit hypothetical) world. We see how Original Sin is like a land being frozen: but we’re then asked to imagine that literally became incarnate to save the country from being really, really, cold.
Tolkien gets into a similar muddle in the latter instantiations of Middle-earth. We read in the Silmarillion that the universe is made of music. Morgoth introduces discordant notes which Illuvator incorporates into the composition: the rebel god’s attempt to spoil the music in the end makes it even more beautiful. That works perfectly well on its own terms as a myth; and once we know that the author is a Roman Catholic, we can see that it is saying something quite deep about the problem of evil. But rather than letting it stand as a story, Tolkien wants to present Middle-earth as fictionalised history. He can’t say that a different God was active in his imaginary past. He doesn’t want to say that the Elves were worshiping a false or imaginary Deity. So Illuvator has to be identified with the actual Catholic God, and Morgoth with the actual theological Satan. The Nordic myth of Morgoth engaging in literal fisticuffs with the King of the Elves outside his stronghold is overwritten by a complicated idea of Morgoth corrupting the actual physical composition of space-time, which will only be healed by Illuvator taking on human form. It isn’t very satisfactory as theology, and it weakens the overall story.
Aslan saves Narnia because he understands the Deep Magic laid down by his father, the Great Emperor Beyond the Sea. Lewis envisages the Deep Magic as functioning according to the medieval theory of the Atonement. The White Witch has a legitimate claim on Narnia: indeed, she functions as the Emperor’s executioner. Aslan makes her a fair offer—if she releases Edmund, she can kill him instead. But it turns out to be a ruse: because the Lion is innocent the Witch has exceeded her authority, which brings her power over Narnia to an end. In the medieval theory, God offered Jesus to Satan in return for the souls in Hell; but Satan failed to spot that Jesus is untouched by original sin, and therefore exceeds his authority and loses his power. It was okay for God to cheat, because Satan cheated when he told Eve fibs about the apple.
Interestingly, this isn’t the model Lewis used when he tried to explain the same theological idea to grown-ups on his radio show. In the BBC broadcasts and in Mere Christianity, he goes with St Anselm’s notion of satisfaction: none but God can make satisfaction for sin, none but Man needs to make satisfaction for sin, so only someone who is both God and Man can do so. Lewis does not endorse the standard evangelical position in which the bloodthirsty Father desires to punish mankind and the innocent Son offers to take the beating on their behalf. He does say, parenthetically, that “even” this “penal” theory doesn’t seem to him to be as nonsensical and immoral as it did before he was a Christian: he offers Anselm’s version as a kind of gloss on the idea.
And his own conversion depended on none of the three theories, but on Tolkien’s suggestion that Crucifixion made sense as a story — exactly the kind of story which CS Lewis liked. What really helped me when I first read Mere Christianity was Lewis’s insistence that theories of how the Atonement work are just that, theories, and you don’t have to believe in a particular version to be Christian. Although he admits that the Catholic who vetted the book didn’t agree with him on this point.
The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe is a kind of narrative poem: the emotions we feel when Aslan is wounded for Edmund’s transgressions are analogous to the ones a Christian should feel when reading about the Crucifixion. It doesn’t really explain or elucidate the doctrine: the Deep Magic cannot be understood.
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Thursday, April 10, 2025
America
Longform essay on the Bad Thing, coming to blog later this month
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