Shataparni Bhattacharya
Roll No. 027
UG – III
The Christian motivations surrounding the work of C.S. Lewis as well as his theological work has been much discussed over the last half-century. He has become a favourite of sorts among Christian movements in the United States and in Europe on the one hand and is reviled for his overt Christian preaching by more secular scholars on the other. However, in my reading, the Pagan aspects of Lewis’ religious beliefs are not as widely discussed. In this essay, I will attempt to gauge how far Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia draws a balance between his Christianity and his pagan sympathies.
The Chronicles of Narnia cannot be distanced from its obvious Christian overtone. Reviewers and critics alike have discussed it at length and it is a redundant topic in the scholarship surrounding Lewis’ work. However, what is relevant to note here is the effect that such an overtly Christian text would have on its young readers. W.W. Robson takes this question a step further, in the context of Lewis’ other work (The Screwtape Letters in this instance) and asks the scholars who have praised Lewis’ religious writings
whether they think any way of writing which aims at promoting Christianity is good. If not, do they not think some of Lewis’s writing might have a bad effect? . . . Many people remember, and dislike, that trick in The Screwtape Letters whereby things the author is prejudiced against, such as modern poetry, or congregational (as opposed to parochial) organization in churches, are discredited – that is the intention – by receiving approval from the devil. But this is a minor lapse in comparison with the general moral pettiness of the book, and this is a fault, I am afraid, which is common in Lewis’s homiletic writings. ‘Take care of the pence and the pounds will take care of themselves’ may be a sound maxim in economics, but is it so in morals? . . . Lewis’s mode of interest in this subject reveals, as does that of Charles Williams, a mixture of horrified fascination combined with superstitious fright. An observation which must be made here goes beyond the realm of taste. ‘His works’, says Mr. Chad Walsh in this volume, ‘were particularly popular with clergy and were on the intellectual firing line – for example, college and university chaplains. It sometimes seemed that they bought his books by the gross in order to give them to eager young intellectuals who were disturbed by religious questions’. Mr. Walsh is speaking of Lewis’s prestige in America, which he says remained high at least till the middle nineteen-fifties. And there is no doubt that in this country as well as in America Lewis’s religious books have been read by a large number of young people. Is it right that young people, perhaps in the torments of puberty, should have books recommended to them which insistently relate a preoccupation with moral trivia to a frightened fascination with eternal flames?[i]
The preoccupation of creating a Christian utopia emerges most evidently in the form of Aslan, who sacrifices himself to save Narnia – certainly a Christ figure. The naming of the eldest child who becomes High King Peter in Narnia, is also certainly not coincidental and carries a distinct evocation of the name of Saint Peter, one of the Twelve Apostles. The journey into the “end of the world” is clearly a Christian heaven. However, the Christian overtones also manifest in far more insidious ways, namely in Susan’s treatment in the books. Susan “grows up” to become antithetical to the Christian values that Aslan and Lewis espouse. She is described as “no longer a friend of Narnia”, and “interested in nothing now-a-days except nylons and lipstick and invitations.” Also “she wasted all her school time wanting to be the age she is now, and she’ll waste all the rest of her life trying to stay that age. Her whole idea is to race on to the silliest time of one’s life as quick as she can and then stop there as long as she can.” Lewis himself mentions in a letter that
The books don’t tell us what happened to Susan. She is left alive in this world at the end, having by then turned into a rather silly, conceited young woman. But there’s plenty of time for her to mend and perhaps she will get to Aslan’s country in the end… in her own way.[ii]
Her character is thus demonized for discovering her femininity, sexuality and even identity as a young woman, by denying her access to the Christian heaven of Narnia. She represents a group of people who have fallen away from faith onto the path of sin, so to speak. It is not surprising that her traits, mentioned condescendingly by her siblings and lamented by her Aunt Polly in The Final Battle, are lambasted. However, these are natural and realistic traits of a girl entering womanhood and are an important part of her coming into her own identity. The scorn exhibited here is an unapologetic manifestation of the religiously-sanctioned taboos on female self-discovery, sexuality and expression. Lewis puritanically denounces “worldly pleasures” and quite unsurprisingly, brands the young woman as undeserving of the Christian heaven because of her nonadherence to “spirituality” and implied obsession with the material world.
This begs the question – how would a young girl reading this story perceive the character of Susan? How would the terrifying prospect of being “locked out of Narnia” be received by her? What would her relationship with this character be, when over the years she realizes that her natural desires of the process of growing up, are what Susan is demonized for? Kate Kinast says
Even my young, agnostic self saw the value of believing in Aslan, who had created this beautiful land for us to live in and who, with his stern kindness, embodied the best English values.[iii]
As a young reader, one would naturally dislike the character of Susan, but how would she retroactively think about that character once she is a young-adult, perhaps shamed for these very tendencies and branded as “silly” and “conceited” by other societal machines of oppression (such as family, school and so on) in much the same way that Lewis brands Susan? Such considerations make the questions posed by Robson even more pertinent.
The Christian belief that gives rise to the character of Aslan is revealed to be further insidious. Narnia is not merely a Christian fantasy; it is also a pastoral and colonial fantasy. The vivid descriptions of the beauty of the natural wilderness, forests, glades and beaches, and the less-than-favourable descriptions of urban spaces clearly reveal Lewis’ pastoral inclinations. Kinast points toward this in the same essay, saying
The Wild Lands of the North consist mainly of a moor, some marshes along the coast, the River Shribble, various unnamed mountains, and Harfang, the ruined city of the Giants. To the west of Narnia lie “wild woods.” Thus, between the Wildlands of the North and Archenland in the south, most of this idyllic country consists of mountains, rivers, marshlands, and forests. It is wonderfully lacking in places where large numbers of people congregate. This makes sense because Narnia, in good times, is inhabited mostly by Talking Animals, who naturally live in places where humans don’t, but Lewis delights in advertising his loathing for all things urban – whether real or imagined. London is a “beastly Hole”; Tashbaan, the capital of Calormen, smells of “unwashed people, unwashed dogs, scent, garlic, onions, and . . . piles of refuse.” Cities are hotbeds of modernity, teeming with evil or misguided people. They are places that might resemble the scheming Ape’s vision of a new Narnia, with “roads and . . . schools and offices and whips and muzzles and saddles and cages and kennels and prisons. . . . Narnia is vast despite what the map shows us, because it is really three visions. It is England, it is heaven, and it is your land – whatever you would like that to be. . . . There are intimations of heaven throughout the books – Reepicheep even paddles there in his coracle when the Dawn Treader reaches the End of the World. By the time Lewis wrote the final installment in the series, The Last Battle, he must have decided that even the heathen souls of his most obtuse readers were worth converting . . . Aslan destroys the old Narnia, and invites the children and all the other worthy creatures to enter a new and infinitely more colorful paradise, by passing through a doorway to “forests and green slopes and sweet orchards and flashing waterfalls, one above the other, going up forever.” Peter, the High King, says, “I’ve got a feeling we’ve got to the country where everything is allowed.” Of course, if you’re the one writing the book, you have the right to dictate what paradise is – what Peter’s “everything” means. For Lewis, it certainly doesn’t include progressive schools or roadways or chopping down trees. This isn’t even an agrarian utopia – there are no farmers, there’s no tilling of the soil in Narnia. His is a more radical vision, a wilderness ideal – let’s live on beaches and in forests, like the Talking Animals that we are. Let’s move continuously, through the grassy meadows, the glades and valleys, up the mountains, and over the seas. If you really need shelter in a pinch, it’s all right to take refuge in a ruined castle or an old tower for a night or two; just don’t make a habit of it, because real living is done in the outdoors, on the move, always exploring and seeking. You’ll be more alive in heaven than you ever were on earth, for heaven is not a static place, it is bursting with adventure; you’re always heading “farther up and farther in.” This is “the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on for ever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.”[iv]
However, this idyllic landscape reveals an underlying colonial nostalgia.
Lewis built Narnia for his own purposes, to embody something that no longer existed for him physically, politically, or philosophically: “the England within England, the real England.” Narnia is an England stripped of modernity, of people, cities, schools, and roads, of all but Good and Evil playing out their battles against the backdrop of an unspoiled landscape. The right kind of person, by adventuring bravely, can lay claim to Narnia and reign over it. But this person can only be a girl or boy possessed of quintessential English qualities: among them honor, pluck, honesty, humility, integrity, stoicism, straightforwardness, courage, an intolerance of nonsense, perseverance, loyalty, and an unstinting willingness to own up to one’s mistakes. If the children uphold these cardinal virtues, Narnia will be theirs, and the Talking Animals and Aslan will recognize their right to rule. In this sense, Narnia is another British colony, a fictive outpost of an idealized and bygone empire, whose inhabitants must either acknowledge that its visitors’ virtues have endowed them with the inherent right to rule or else simply succumb to their Aslan-given strength. (None of this registered in my ten-year-old brain, much less the Christian message or the racist portrayals of the evil, dark-skinned Calormenes.) Alas for C. S. Lewis, the British Empire is accessible only through magic or fiction these days, and the country he longed for may never have existed; luckily for us, he created seven books in its stead. But perhaps the clearest indication that Narnia is a stand-in for England comes when the Pevensies are hiding from the White Witch. While they try to figure out how to rescue poor Mr. Tumnus, Mrs. Beaver fortifies them with a “great and gloriously sticky marmalade roll.” If hell is other people, then Narnia is surely heaven. When you are lucky enough to be transported there, you almost always enter unoccupied territory, be it snowy woods, “a woody place” next to an empty beach, or “a very lonely forest.” Even in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Eustace, Jill, and Edmund must first plunge into a chilly sea before being hauled aboard ship to join Caspian and his crew. In The Magician’s Nephew, Polly and Digory are transported to “the quietest wood you could possibly imagine,” permeated by “green daylight,” and dotted with pools. They almost immediately begin to forget London. Lewis’s concept of heaven feels like a real place, like England perfected – Albion, but not ethereal, not an abstraction. How else to explain the pull Narnia has on us? To be a place that we dearly want to visit, a strong thread of reality must wind through it. Unlike Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, for example, which is utterly fantastic, or Oz, which is beautifully bizarre, Narnia, so thoroughly English, is rooted in the real, albeit in a highly idealized fashion. What could be more solid and lifelike than trees and mountains, grass and flowers, headlands and bays? . . . Peter, the High King, says, “I’ve got a feeling we’ve got to the country where everything is allowed.” Of course, if you’re the one writing the book, you have the right to dictate what paradise is – what Peter’s “everything” means.[v]
Having thus briefly established the evidently Christian, Pastoral and Colonial motivations that drive the Narnia series, I will now turn my attention to the Pagan aspects of Lewis’ philosophy in general and in these books in particular. David H. Sick writes about the sententiae written by Lewis in a series of letters that he exchanged with Father Giovanni Calabria in 1953 and 1954. He gives the account that
The two theologians were debating the relationship between the modern West of the twentieth century and its Graeco-Roman ancestor. The father was claiming that Europe was becoming pagan again, and Lewis, surprisingly, responded, ‘Utinam fieret!’ ‘Would that it were!’ As the opening quotations indicate, Lewis believed that the adherents to the traditional Graeco-Roman religion had access to a truth, a ‘lumen naturale’, that modern apostates had lost. The revelation of this natural light was subsequently perfected by the rise of Christianity only to be rejected by modern skepticism. Lewis’s views are made more striking by their expression in Latin; thus, not only in content but in medium his comments demonstrate his commitment and respect for the classical tradition.[vi]
Lewis himself mentioned that he had the “deepest respect for Pagan myth”[vii]. C.J.S. Hayward notes that Lewis once said that if you’re not going to be a Christian, the next best thing is to be a good Norseman, because “the Norse pagans sided with the good gods…”[viii] Also noteworthy, is Lewis’ remark “First let us make the younger generation good pagans and afterwards let us make them Christians” in one of his letters[ix]. Lewis’ Pagan leanings cannot be disregarded, and it is in this light that we must view the talking animals, the fantastical creatures taken from Graeco-Roman mythology and the “good”, “deep” magic of Narnia.
While literature over the ages have made use of anthropomorphised animals (as early as the medieval debate-poem The Owl and The Nightingale to as near-contemporary to Lewis as Lewis Carroll’s works, a generation before C.S. Lewis), I find it difficult to believe that an author as sensitive to the devices used in his writing and the meaning they convey as Lewis was, would simply make use of the trope for no reason other that to make his stories appealing to children. The lion, Aslan, can be understood easily. In a Sermon made by Augustine, the lamb stands for Christ’s sacrifice and the lion for Christ resurrected:
He endured death as a lamb; he devoured it as a lion.[x]
The lion was used symbolically to stand for the quintessential “English” qualities of courage, valour and masculinity – from titles such as Richard “the Lionheart” in the 12th century to a symbol of colonial power (after the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857, newspapers and gazettes would carry illustrations of the English lion defeating the Bengal tiger, to raise English morale).
However, the Bible holds no such portrayal of the lion. Isiah 35:9 forbids the lion from the future paradise:
No lion shall be there, nor any ravenous beast shall go up thereon, it shall not be found there; but the redeemed shall walk there.[xi]
Although, in 11:6,7, Isaiah does allow such formerly “ravenous” beasts to become peaceable:
Then the lion shall lie down with the lamb and the bear shall eat grass like the ox and the child shall play on the hole of the asp and nothing shall hurt nor destroy in all my Holy Mountain![xii]
More importantly, in the Bible, there are two instances of talking animals – the snake in the garden of Eden and Balaam’s talking donkey – the first being an incarnation of Satan, and the second being made to remain silent by its master with the copious use of a whip. The animals of Narnia, however, signify the forces of Good, unlike any of the examples of anthropomorphised animals that the Bible provides us with. However, it is quite possible, that this is not, in fact, a manifestation of Lewis’ Pagan inclinations, but can be justified using his Christian theology. Regarding the matter of the talking snake, Lewis says
The first chapters of Genesis, no doubt, give the story of creation in the form of a folk-tale.[xiii]
If The Chronicles of Narnia were meant to follow in the didactic folk-lore tradition, as Lewis believes was true of Genesis, then perhaps it is only a Christian allegory after all.
However, the fantastical concept of the Deep Magic upon which Narnia is based also contradicts any attempts to tie Lewis’ conception of Narnia down as an orthodox Anglican paradise. It does not seem probable to me that an orthodox Christian writer would ever have produced a series of books on magic in the 1950s, in a nation where children’s literature involving such subjects still face hostility from certain quarters (who, ironically, hail Lewis as a stalwart of such Christian movements).
Lastly, and what is most convincing to me, is the heavy influence that Lewis draws from Graeco-Roman mythology to populate his fantastical land. Figures such as fauns, nymphs, dryads, Bacchus, and Silenus from the Greek and Roman traditions, and dwarfs and giants from Norse mythology abound. Insofar as Narnia is a construction of heaven, it is a heaven – whether Pagan or Christian – that is home to Pagan figures. In my reading, Lewis was Christian enough to believe in the scriptural distinction between the “temporal” and the “eternal”. Narnia is a space that exists beyond the finite “temporal” human construction of historical time. Narnia is eternal, and it is the space that the souls of individuals journey to after death and judgement – after exiting the temporal. This is exemplified in The Last Battle, with the awakening of Father Time who ushers in the destruction of Old Narnia and opens the gateway to the New Narnia. However, this eternal is an agglomeration of all faiths. Lewis, of course, only used figures from the three traditions he was most familiar with – the Christian, the Greco-Roman and the Norse. However, in my reading, Narnia represents not only religious faith, but all kinds of faith – including the faith that young children have in the ability of animals to talk. More importantly, Lewis’ use of the figure of Bacchus in Prince Caspian is ample evidence that Narnia does not represent a Puritanical heaven, which one can only receive access to by the renouncement of worldly material concerns and embracing of Christian ethics and abstinence.
In conclusion, reading C.S. Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia as merely Puritanical Christian moralization or simply as an attempt at constructing a Christian heaven is facetious and simplistic. While it may well be all of those things, the overwhelming textual as well as contextual evidence pointing toward other subtexts cannot and must not be ignored in order to understand Lewis’ theology in a comprehensive manner.
[i] Robson, W.W., “C. S. Lewis”, The Cambridge Quarterly, Vol. 1, No. 3 (1965 – 1966). pp 252-272.
[ii] Lewis, C.S., Letters to Children, edited by Lyle Wesley Dorsett and Marjory Lamp Mead. New York: Touchstone, 1985.
[iii] Kinast, Kate, “Paradise Lost:: Revisiting Narnia”, SiteLINES: A Journal of Place , Vol. 11, No. 1 (Fall 2015). pp 12.
[iv] ibid. pp 12-15.
[v] ibid. pp 14-15.
[vi] Sick, David H., “The “Daimones” Of C. S. Lewis”, Literature and Theology, Vol. 22, No. 2 (June 2008). pp 151-161
[vii] Lewis, C.S., The Problem of Pain. London: Harper Collins, 1940. pp 71.
[viii] Hayward, C.J.S., The Sign of the Grail. Wheaton: C.J.S. Hayward Publications, 1995.
[ix] Ford, Paul F., Yours, Jack: The Inspirational Letters of C.S. Lewis. London: Harper, 2008. pp 219
[x] Augustine, Sermon 375A.
[xi] Isaiah 35:9
[xii] Isaiah 11:6-7
[xiii] Lewis, C. S., “Dogma and the Universe” in God in the Dock. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1970. pp 42
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
- C.J.S. Hayward. The Sign of the Grail. Wheaton: C.J.S. Hayward Publications, 1995.
- C.S. Lewis. The Chronicles of Narnia. London: HarperCollins Publishers, 2005.
- C.S. Lewis. God in the Dock. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1970.
- C.S. Lewis. Letters to Children. New York: Touchstone, 1985.
- C.S. Lewis. The Problem of Pain. London: Harper Collins, 1940
- David H. Sick. “The “Daimones” Of C. S. Lewis”, Literature and Theology, Vol. 22, No. 2 (June 2008).
- Kate Kinast. “Paradise Lost:: Revisiting Narnia”, SiteLINES: A Journal of Place , Vol. 11, No. 1 (Fall 2015).
- Michael D. Coogan (ed). The New Oxford Annotated Bible, Fourth Edition. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.
- Paul F. Ford (ed). Yours, Jack: The Inspirational Letters of C.S. Lewis. London: Harper, 2008.
- Philip Schaff (ed). A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, Vol. 6. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005.
- W.W. Robson. “C. S. Lewis”, The Cambridge Quarterly, Vol. 1, No. 3 (1965 – 1966).
History, Literature, Criticism 