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.
Continues
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