Narnia

[liv]

Narnia-related conversations in several places have sparked my curiosity: where were you when you understood that the Narnia books are about Christianity? Or did you always know?

I read The Magician's Nephew and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe when I was quite little, maybe 5 or 6 ish? I didn't know about reading in publication rather than chronological order, and I have an unusual degree of affection for The Magician's Nephew. I found it slightly weird, but, well, I was reading a lot of books that were really meant for somewhat older kids (or even adults) and I was generally used to the idea that everything in books is weird and half-understood.

So I went looking for more books in the series, and found Prince Caspian which felt very sequel-ish, the Pevensies return to Narnia and a bunch of unmemorable stuff happens. And then I found The voyage of the Dawn Treader, which felt properly exciting again (I do slightly muddle it in memory with Arthur Ransome's We didn't mean to go to sea). And then there's that scene at the end where Aslan turns out to be a Lamb as well as a Lion, and that was the moment where my lovely portal fantasy turned out to be preaching about Jesus.

One of the discussions I read, I think on Making Light, roughly divided people into two groups, more or less that people from a Christian background realize the allegory at the end of Dawn Treader, and people from non-Christian backgrounds get all the way through to The Last Battle with their innocence intact. I don't know why as a seven-year-old Jewish kid I had any idea about Jesus as the Sacrificial Lamb, I think I was just a sponge for random facts about about the world.

The thing is that this was really bad timing for me, because I had just started at a new school and I was in a class with a teacher who bullied me really badly, for lots of reasons but a prominent one was that she was upset that I didn't share her Christian beliefs. So I was getting shouted at a lot for not believing in Jesus and particularly for not believing in Original Sin (which the teacher felt should have been a gimme as it's in the Old Testament), and to find out that Aslan, the fantasy character I loved, was Jesus after all was really upsetting.

I mean, getting bullied about religion had made me really stubborn about the fact that I don't believe in Jesus. So I think my main feeling was not the more typically reported sense of betrayal that preaching was sneaked into the story, but more like feeling excluded, this story was not for me, it was for Christian children. I felt vaguely guilty for cheering for Aslan, given that I was personally fighting for my right not to consider that I was Saved by Jesus' sacrifice, whereas within the story I had accepted the idea that Aslan's sacrifice saved Edmund. It wasn't until I was older that I started worrying about whether Aslan's sacrifice was meaningful if he was really the creator of Narnia and outside the rules that normally mean dead people have to stay dead.

Later on I met OICCU types (I'm always tempted to call them oiks) who quoted Lewis at me, and I thought, you're not tapping into childhood nostalgia, you're evoking childhood misery because it's only been a decade since last time someone tried to bully me into believing in Jesus. Besides, I may have quibbles with how CS Lewis understood religion, but college Christian Union zealots really really don't understand Lewis.

Comments

[lilacsigil]

I was raised in a culturally Christian environment - went to Sunday School occasionally, went to an Anglican high school - but I didn't recognise Narnia as a Christian allegory until I was told that it was some time in my late teens, to my great surprise. I only remember getting really angry at the end of The Last Battle on Susan's behalf, and avoiding that book on all re-readings. I later read some other Lewis books and that intense, smug paternalism retroactively tainted Narnia for me, unfortunately.

[liv]

Yeah, I was brought up in a fairly Christian culture, including Christian schools. So maybe that's why I was set up to recognize the Lion/Lamb thing. I was basically alienated from the books before I ever read The horse and his boy or The last battle, so I don't remember having a strong emotional reaction about Susan. In some ways she was the character I most related to, the sort of sensible big sister type, and, well, I was already extremely aware that Christians don't think I am going to Heaven, so the fact that Susan is excluded was just another instance of Christians being wrong about the afterlife. I was young enough that I didn't understand the thing about lipstick and stockings, that she was effectively punished for growing up or for being sexual.

And yes, I do think Lewis can be very smug and paternalistic, though I do like some of The Screwtape letters. But I definitely do have bad associations with Lewis' version of Christianity because of the stupid preachy Christian Union types.

[simont]

On a very tangential note about other Lewis books, I remember being much more annoyed as a child by Out of the Silent Planet than I was by Narnia.

But the reason why has nothing really to do with what Lewis was trying to achieve by the book. It's because the first I saw of OotSP was a snippet from the middle of it, quoted in a sort of anthology of teasers from a wide variety of books: it's the part where Ransom is in the valley full of hrossa and is trying to learn their language, and it follows in some detail the process of how you might go about that with no common basis of communication to begin with, starting with point-and-name and proceeding to him figuring out some of the grammar, morphology etc. and getting gradually more able to find out more subtle things as his communication improves.

I was absolutely fascinated, and resolved to read the rest of the book at the first opportunity – and it turns out, of course, that the rest of it is tedious Christian advert breaks even less subtle than Narnia, and the snippet quoted out of context in my anthology was the only really good bit of the whole book. In the words of Randall Munroe, I wish the whole book had been more of that scene!

[liv]

Heh. I feel much like that about The sparrow; there's a small amount of very cool linguistics, and far too much weird Christian theology.

[simont]

I loved the whole series when I was eight or so, and read it repeatedly. I think I didn't find out it was Christian propaganda until some time in my teens, by which time it was distant enough in my memory to evoke no more than a bit of an eye-roll.

I went back and re-read it all a few years ago, around the time the LWW film came out. (Not consciously because of the film, though it's perfectly possible that the upcoming film caused lots of people to happen to mention Narnia in conversation, which in turn planted the idea of rereading it in my head.) When I did that, I was struck by the fact that with one notable exception, the Christian propaganda is quite separate from the exciting fantasy storytelling, and the latter had stuck in my memory much better than the former: for example, my memories of The Magician's Nephew were quite detailed in the sections with the Wood Between The Worlds, the yellow and green rings, Charn, the creation of Narnia, and Jadis's visit to London, and almost completely blank about the huge deal made of the magic apple tree and the attempted temptation. It's as if my 8-year-old brain had recognised that bit (and several others) as tedious advert breaks and quietly filtered them out, even without really understanding what was being advertised.

The one notable exception to that clear separation into proper story and advert breaks, of course, is Aslan's self-sacrifice and resurrection in LWW, just because it's so totally central to the plot that you can't possibly forget it if you remember anything about how the story goes. And of course that's the one Lewis wrote first, so I can't help wondering if that was his one actually good idea in this area and the rest was bodged together half-heartedly...

[alextiefling]

I can't help wondering if that was his one actually good idea in this area and the rest was bodged together half-heartedly

This is my enduring thought about the series. There isn't anything like enough fuel in that one analogy to power an entire seven-book sequence. And it's especially problematic that the book with the good idea ends up as number 2. TMN is a pretty good prequel, and TH&HB a good interquel*, but every subsequent return to the well diminishes the impact of TLTW&TW culminating in an event which Lewis fairly explicitly portrays as the Narnian part of the trans-universal meta-historical event of the Passion.

*Team Aravis, always.

[liv]

Slightly tongue-in-cheek, but doesn't the New Testament have the same problem? It has the climax of Jesus' death and resurrection very near the beginning, and then there's another two dozen books about the disciples and Paul wandering about doing slightly random stuff, and then Revelation, which, well. I've always thought that the big problem with The last battle isn't that Lewis failed to write a fantasy version of Revelation, but that Revelation fundamentally doesn't work as the final chapter of a novel, if you're expecting anything like modern novel conventions. And then there's another two thousand years of history in which the life and death of Jesus certainly have a big impact, but fundamentally the world still carries on existing much the same, with its burdens of sin and suffering and death.

[alextiefling]

doesn't the New Testament have the same problem?

A perfect example of why reading scripture like novels usually doesn't work. The NT has roughly the same structure as the Tanakh: some important narrative expounding the origin of the faith, some discursive and prophetic material, and a single apocalypse at the end. To be honest, the NT would benefit from some poetry...

Revelation suffers greatly from being read by Christians as though it were unique, rather than the best of a very mixed genre all of dubious provenance. I'm not sure a fantasy treatment of Christianity needs it.

The failure of the world to end punctually within the lifetimes of the apostles was an immediate problem for early Christians; there's even some editorialising about it in John's Gospel. But from a Narnian point of view, the problem is more acute: Aslan's death and resurrection [I]don't[/I] seem to have a big historical impact on the world, and the spiritual effect is just as invisible as in our own world. The only Narnians who later appear to care about the specifics of Aslan's 'passion' are the evil cultists in PC. Other than that, it's business as usual. The invasion of the Telmarines is clearly the largest demographic shift in Narnian history; Jadis' reign of terror seems short in comparison.

[liv]

Yes, I think you're right, the one good idea of an allegorical retelling of the Passion isn't enough to sustain the whole seven-book series. There's still some very good portal fantasy round the edges, but the bits where it's squeezed to fit the Christian allegory framework don't work very well. Regarding the pastede-on Christian bits as tedious advert breaks makes a lot of sense.

It seems to me the best audience for the Narnia books are precocious kids, advanced enough to read a fairly complex story but young enough not to question the underlying theology / allegory. I think that's why the characters in Lev Grossman's The magicians are so obsessed with their thinly-disguised equivalent of Narnia; I found that a very realistic portrayal, though I think Grossman's critique of Narnia doesn't work well.

[alextiefling]

I always knew. I was raised in a CofE household, and attended Holy Week and Easter services from an early age. To me, Aslan's sacrifice in TLTW&TW was an obvious allegory for the crucifixion, and from quite early on it bugged me that 'Deeper Magic from Before the Dawn of Time' was an unsatisfying characterisation of Atonement theology. (The search for an actually workable theology of the Atonement has continued to be a major feature of my Christian life, and a much more distinctive point of difference between me and most evangelicals than anything about ritual.)

I loved TMN, and gained renewed respect for it when I read Dante's Divine Comedy, as I felt that the garden where the healing apple is found was probably inspired by the Earthly Paradise - a good mirror of the fallen Eden. Lewis, with his love of classical pagan syncretism, was probably thinking at least as much of the Garden of the Hesperides, but still.

I really don't like TLB, and not just for Susan-related reasons. The business about Tash, while not an actual Voodoo Shark non-fix, is still a pretty crappy (and creepy) approach to unfamiliar religion. But more generally, the apocalyptic feel which begins to creep in after leaving the final island in VotDT, and which pervades TSC, is stifling in TLB. I like apocalyptic literature, but it doesn't make for good YA novels, especially in such an uncritical treatment.

[liv]

That's a really interesting perspective, from a religiously knowledgeable Christian child presented with the stories as being about your own religion. I think that's probably the audience Lewis had in mind, as he was writing in an era when he could reasonably expect most children would have a fairly comprehensive Christian education. I don't think he was intending to bait-and-switch his readers by presenting an enjoyable fantasy story and sneaking Jesus into it.

The Atonement stuff kind of offended my sense of justice when I was a kid, and I can't say I'm entirely over the feeling that it seems deeply unfair for God to punish all of humanity just because their progenitor committed a sin, and equally it seems deeply unfair for God to punish sinless Jesus for the actual sins of anybody else. It's really interesting to me that that's something you struggle with.

I think Dante, too, would have been influenced by Classical Pagan thought, so it's not surprising you see similar elements in Dante and Lewis. And I do think you're right that apocalypse literature doesn't fit very well into the children's fantasy frame, there just isn't a way to do it that would make it work within the established genre.

[alextiefling]

So-called Substitutionary Atonement (which is what the Deeper Magic amounts to) has always been deeply problematic. [I]Penal[/I] Substitutionary Atonement, in which Jesus' fate is explicitly the appalling punishment that should have been ours for the sin we could not help committing, is even worse. Fortunately, it's not the only game in town.

(Personal theology snippet follows - please feel free to ignore.)

I am personally a proponent of a reconciliation/reunification theory of the atonement, in which Jesus' life and death serve as a bridge between the fallibility of the world and the eternity of the deity. 'Original sin' as a moral fault is a mistake (I believe this is the view in Eastern Orthodox Christianity, although I'm no expert) - our fallibility is because in order for us to evolve and possess free will, we must live in a world of change and entropy. So we're not perfectible in the Pelagian sense of being able to choose pure good without help, but we're not inevitably depraved either. The function of the incarnation is thus principally to unite the impassible divine nature and the fragile human nature in a single being. (The Council of Chalcedon was very definite on the two natures business.) Jesus' death is the working-out of this - he's not spared the worst the the world can throw at him, because he's a participant in all our sufferings: he's a refugee, a homeless person, a citizen of an occupied country, and the victim of the occupier's state violence. Redemption doesn't come from the Passion alone, but rather from the whole action of God participating in human life: God becomes like us, and thus we can become like God.

[sfred]

To me, Aslan's sacrifice in TLTW&TW was an obvious allegory for the crucifixion...

This, me too, reading aged 6ish. I can't remember whether I knew from my parents that the books were intended as Christian allegories or whether it was just obvious to me. This in the context of being a Baptist minister's child and there being an awful lot of religious books around.

[I'm going to come back later and read the rest of the comments properly...]

[liv]

I'm really glad I asked, because the comment discussion has turned out really interesting. And I'm quite pleased that I have a few friends who were religiously knowledgeable enough that the allegory was obvious even when they were quite little.

[sfred]

My parents both had theology degrees (and one of them was a minister) and there was a *lot* of casual discussion of theology/comparative religion at home.

I read the books lots of times, too, even though there were bits that really annoyed me from very early on (gender division in weapon allocation, the whole Tash business in TLB; stupid remarks about mixed-gender schooling in TSC; lots about how Eustace is handled). The whole series was such a big part of my cultural backdrop that I loved it regardless of how much of it I liked or didn't. I don't know if that makes any sense!

I'm sorry your teacher was so awful.

[iddewes]

I didn't know as a child at all, it was only when I went to University and discussed the books with a friend who IS quite strongly Christian that she told me they related to Christianity!
I converted to Judaism as an adult, so I was not a Jewish child, but my parents were not particularly religious, and I mostly went to school in a part of Canada where the publicly funded schools were either secular or Catholic, and I always went to the secular schools, so I never really learnt much about Christian teachings anyway. We had no RE at school there at all.

[liv]

That makes sense, that you found out about the Christian bits of it as an adult. I generally love secularism but public schools not teaching religion at all seems very strange to me.

[jack]

*hugs* I'm really sorry about your teacher :(

I think, I read all the books except the last battle and I had no clue. I think the bit with the lamb, I remember thinking "wait, is that Jesus?" or something like that, but I don't think I really connected it to the rest of the books.

I've no idea how I failed making the connection, I think I went to a CoE-y school, but got a vague idea of religion involving platitudes and God being up in the sky, but didn't actually grok any of the theology.

And then years later, I read Last Battle and I think by then I had some idea, but just found it really really sad. I liked some of the early bits, but the well-meaning donkey was tricked into being evil and the selfish ape turned from rogueish and misguided to really evil, and all the Narnians fell to the inevitabilitiy, and the good guys made an effort and then everything they tried failed, and they tried harder -- and still failed. And then it was scary and everyone died.

And it felt really arbitrary, like the world went evil because everyone was worshipping false-Aslan. But Aslan could have cleared everything up by just asking them not to. And I didn't quite have the sense of this at the time, but everyone KNEW false Aslan was asking them to do bad things, but they did them anyway -- because the message "do whatever Aslan said" had been drummed into them. If Aslan had told them to think for themselves all along, they wouldn't have been in that fix! And then rather than fixing it, Aslan writes off the world and ends it. And then everyone randomly dies, and then something something heaven.

[jack]

And FWIW, I loved a lot the books. LWW. And I really liked Prince Caspian, the first half with the island and the trek through the woods felt like a classic secondry world adventure, but also like the pevensies were really getting on and DOING something, not just doing what people told them. And I enjoyed most of Dawn Treader a lot. And I liked HaHB and MN. And I liked parts of SC (Puddleglum) although it felt like a slightly different world.

[jack]

And fwiw, some of the bits now I can see are direct allegories to something, I appreciated at the time -- lots of people are annoyed by Eustace turning into a dragon, but even though the exact mechanics aren't explained, I found it hit all the right emotional notes for a story -- Eustace is dragoned because he's selfish and short-sighted, and freed because he's helpful and bold.

But many others, I didn't know what they were about, but I remember not grokking them at the time, either because they didn't hang together with the plot given, or because they relied on theology I've still not picked up. Like Aslan's sacrifice, his actual death and resurrection were really moving. But I didn't understand the trade at all -- surely LOTS of people were traitors, including Tumnus, why does this all happen for Edmund? Who made this rule that traitors belong to the witch? Since most of it (the rule about traitors, the fact that suddenly it matters to Edmund but not the other people killed, the deep magic, the deeper magic) are all made up on the spot, it doesn't feel like Aslan is actually giving anything up, rather, he's just announcing "the plot randomly says this happens next".

[simont]

Like Aslan's sacrifice, his actual death and resurrection were really moving. But I didn't understand the trade at all

A thing I noticed in my re-read was that Aslanity seems generally less subtle than 'real' Christianity, in a way that I couldn't help thinking might reduce its effectiveness as propaganda.

For example, Christ's sacrifice in Christianity is supposed to confer a nebulously specified benefit in the next life, whereas Aslan's sacrifice in LWW confers the much more immediately tangible benefit of everybody not dying in the first place by virtue of causing the Witch to be defeated.

I recall other examples coming up elsewhere in the series, for example Lucy finding the extreme-beauty spell in the book in Dawn Treader and being tempted to read it: in our world, she'd have had to resist that temptation by herself, perhaps with a little help from imagining how God or Jesus or both wouldn't like it, but in the Narniaverse, she actually fails to resist temptation, but it's OK because she's promptly rescued by Aslan actually manifesting in the book and saying 'ahem'.

It made me think that, read by a certain kind of mind, this could surely make at least some people less likely to believe in Christianity, because the message of these books is that the effects of gods that truly exist are really obvious and difficult to miss – and hence, the effects that happen in Christianity, which are so subtle that we rely on the Bible and other people to tell us they're happening at all, might be dismissed on the grounds that they clearly don't fall into that same category.

[jack]

Aslan's sacrifice in LWW confers the much more immediately tangible benefit of everybody not dying in the first place by virtue of causing the Witch to be defeated.

Huh! I had completely the opposite reading -- I thought his sacrifice saved Edmund at the near-certain cost of everyone else dying and the white witch ruling Narnia for the rest of eternity, which they escaped by (a) getting lucky that a 14-year-old boy was as good a general as a 1000s of year old god (b) Aslan getting resurrected so he could save everyone at the castle and the battle like he should have done in first place, by way of the secret Deeper Magic which he knew about but kept secret to let everyone think they were going to die.

Did I miss something?

[simont]

It's certainly possible that I missed something. I don't actually have a copy of Narnia to refer to: all I have conveniently to hand is some jottings in a text editor that I wrote down on the occasion of my re-reading, so if I got something wrong at the time then my notes will reflect that.

[simont]

(b) Aslan getting resurrected so he could save everyone at the castle and the battle like he should have done in first place, by way of the secret Deeper Magic

But going by my admittedly only vague memories ... I think my reading of this part was that only Aslan's trip through death and back via the Deeper Magic had given him the power to save everyone at the castle, so that's why he couldn't have done it in the first place. But whether that was even hinted at in the text, or whether it was something my own brain helpfully filled in to make the plot make sense ('oh hai, fixed that for you'), I couldn't say without going back to the actual text again.

[alextiefling]

I think my reading of this part was that only Aslan's trip through death and back via the Deeper Magic had given him the power to save everyone at the castle

I definitely read that sequence in the light of the hymn 'Ye Choirs of New Jerusalem':

How Judah's Lion burst his chains
And crushed the serpent's head
And brought with him, from death's domains
The long-imprisoned dead.

Which in turn is a reference to the Harrowing of Hell, and the castle with the statues very definitely seemed to me to be a sort of Hell, although I don't think I viewed the petrified creatures as literally dead.

[mc776]

the castle with the statues very definitely seemed to me to be a sort of Hell

I have not read the LWW since learning about the existence of things other than penal substitutionary atonement. Thank you for pointing this out!

(boy, between this, The Great Divorce and death working backwards as simont quotes below, no wonder it sometimes seems half the English-speaking Orthodox world seems ready to canonize Lewis as an honourary saint...)

[simont]

Ah, hang on, things are bubbling up from the depths of my memory. Sorry to keep replying piecemeal like this; my head's working quite slowly today.

I think the reason I had that thought about saving everyone in the castle was: "when a willing victim who had committed no treachery was killed in a traitor's stead, the Table would crack and Death itself would start working backwards". And I interpreted "Death working backwards" as a global change in the nature of the universe – it didn't just enable Aslan himself to come back from the dead, it also enabled all the turned-to-stone (i.e. dead) people in the castle to be unstoned, because that was a piece of magic relying on the same change in the natural laws.

[jack]

Ah! That makes sense, it's almost like something out of HP&MoR, I think your version actually fits typical Christian ideas a lot better (maybe that's where it came from?)

I don't _think_ the books said that (everyone seemed to assume Aslan could defeat the witch from the beginning, for instance), but I'm not certain.

[jack]

the message of these books is that the effects of gods that truly exist are really obvious and difficult to miss – and hence, the effects that happen in Christianity, which are so subtle that we rely on the Bible and other people to tell us they're happening at all, might be dismissed

I know what you mean. I _think_ what's going on is, partly the books are a message about how you should act, that you should be good and honorable and trust in the christian message, and so, and those are reinforced by both Aslan saying so, but also in turning out for the best (eg. Lucy spies on her friend and the consequences are directly bad, not that Aslan punishes her).

And partly, people think the effects _are_ obvious in our world and _aren't_ subtle, and Narnia is just a more accessible interpretation of them, not a more convincing one. (That's obviously something they'd disagree with you about.)

In fact, several times, I felt like there COULD have been a good allegory but wasn't, like I felt if Aslan's sacrifice had been clearer, it would have been a whole lot more moving, and whether or not I agreed Jesus did the same thing, I might have WANTED to believe. But because I just didn't get it, I didn't have a lot of emotional investment in the allegory.

[jack]

One bit that stuck with me as actually having a memorable pro-Christian evangelising effect, was the bit where the dwarves are in the stable in the last battle and refuse to see Aslan and heaven.

It's like, however much I'd LIKE to be able to fly, people saying "flying it really awesome" is not going to make me more likely to start jumping off things, because however much I'd LIKE to, I have no reason to think it would actually work.

But if people say "everyone else does it all the time, it's really easy, just jump in the air and see", I find it really hard to say "no, I know in advance it's not going to work, I'm not going to try it".

[lilacsigil]

Yes! Arbitrary! The earlier books followed emotional logic at least, but this one suddenly just squashed every effort because it was squashing time, and that was it. I can remember being excited when Aslan turned up, then he was just as horrible and depressing as the rest of the book. I really didn't get the something something heaven part: I really thought they had lost the battle and were now dead, and Susan didn't even get to be there with her family.

[liv]

Thanks for being sympathetic. The year I was rising 8 was a long time ago, but it was pretty grim at the time, and I'm still mildly scarred by it.

It sounds like your Christian education was fairly rubbish, very much confusing God with Santa Claus as Salinger puts it.

Your critique of The Last Battle is much more sophisticated than mine; unlike the earlier books in the series I only read it a couple of times and don't remember it very well beyond that it was depressing. I love the idea that things would have been better if Aslan told everybody to think for themselves. I agree that inevitable doom doesn't make for a very good plot.

[jack]

*hugs*

It sounds like your Christian education was fairly rubbish,

Well, it didn't teach me much about Christianity! But I don't know if it would have been better if it had -- it would probably have led to me having to officially accept or reject it, which might have been difficult, whereas "just vaguely nodding along" worked ok :)

I love the idea that things would have been better if Aslan told everybody to think for themselves.

I don't think I actually put it in those terms at the time, it's just everything was confusing and depressing. But now I can maybe see WHY I was confused and depressed.

Like, in Prince Caspian, Aslan shows himself briefly to Lucy but can't or won't show himself to the others, they ignore the hints, it goes badly, they follow him, it all turns out ok. That felt really arbitrary, I didn't understand why he was making it difficult. But it DID turn out ok. And they're taught to (a) do whatever Aslan says, even if it's incredibly oblique and brief and cryptic and (b) trust Aslan to make everything come out ok in the end.

And in Last Battle, everyone DOES do what "Aslan" says, even though they're not sure it's right, and they DO hope Aslan will make everything ok in the end. And I hope Aslan will appear and fix everything because people tried hard, as he did in each other book. But no, this time, he doesn't do anything and everyone dies horribly.

[alextiefling]

I'm also very sorry to learn you had such an awful time; I've heard similar stories about CofE education from other friends, and I'm very angry at our education system and the people who control it. I had a horrible time at CofE primary school for very different reasons; I wasn't treated like some kind of hellbound heretic until I went to Roman Catholic secondary school.

I feel that religious education is very important, and we tend to do it disastrously badly.

[antisoppist]

I had read and enjoyed the Narnia books as a child. I then saw a dramatised version on television in my early teens and spluttered "What? Aslan is like Jesus!", at which point my mother said the equivalent of "well, yes, duh!" and I was extremely cross at not having noticed before/having been tricked by the author.

But despite a Church of England childhood, I didn't pick up on it from reading the books. I had to *see* it to notice it.

[liv]

Whereas I'm much much worse at noticing subtext in visual media than in books. I can just imagine being cross at feeling tricked like that. But I think it wasn't intended as a trick, it was intended to be obvious to the presumed Christian reader.

[antisoppist]

No I don't think Lewis was out to deliberately trick me but I felt cheated somehow nevertheless, partly because in my childhood people were constantly saying "oh didn't you notice X?" and I thought books were safe from that sort of thing.

[liv]

Oh, yuck, that kind of feeling tricked, where adults laugh at a child for not spotting some subtext or hidden meaning the child couldn't reasonably have known about. I am not surprised you resented Lewis for that!

[davidgillon]

Oh, ick on your teacher!

I'm going to be the odd one out in never having read them. They weren't something that ever came up even though I was a voracious reader as a child. I was vaguely aware they were out there, but don't recall ever picking up a copy, nor having them mentioned at (Catholic) school.

So the first time I knew they were a Christian allegory was when I read the entry on them in the Encyclopaedia of Fantasy, and that completely put me off ever reading them. I have this vague memory of sitting there going 'He did what?!? In a kids book!?!' I'm uncomfortable with Christian evangelization at the best of times (no matter I'm Catholic) and this struck me as being almost abusive in nature.

[liv]

Thanks for believing me about my horrible teacher; a lot of the time I tell this story and people can't imagine a teacher being openly anti-semitic or otherwise that inappropriate, and I really hate having to convince people that my experiences actually happened.

I'm impressed that you're the only English-speaking bookish child not to have read the Narnia books. I think if you're over about eight you're probably too old to get much out of them, beyond that they're part of the cultural fabric. And yeah, I don't like evangelizing to kids either, but I think that's not what Lewis was aiming for, I think he was writing for kids who were already Christians to help them to understand their faith better, which is still dubious but less outright abusive.

[davidgillon]

I run into so many people who don't believe me about disability discrimination it seems only reasonable to believe other people talking about their own discrimination experiences. Which is not to say I'm not appalled and horrified that happened to you.

I think part of the reason I missed out on Narnia may be that my family weren't traditionally middle-class (both sets of grandparents were mining families) and though my father was a professional that cultural fabric was a little patchy. That's not to say that people didn't read, just that the choice of books didn't automatically include Narnia.

[liv]

Yes, I thought you might relate to the not being believed thing. People suck, and sometimes in consistent ways in different contexts *sigh*

And yes, it makes sense that if your parents came from a non-middle-class background, they didn't have that shared idea of what children's books "everybody" should read.

Parental Influence

[(Anonymous)]

"And yes, it makes sense that if your parents came from a non-middle-class background, they didn't have that shared idea of what children's books "everybody" should read."

Not necessarily. Ga-Ga was the daughter of Eastern European immigrants but she was totally immersed in the so-called classics, both children's and adults'. Of course, her parents apparently made a deliberate effort to acculturate and to bring their children up as British.

[yvi]

Same here, never read them,only watched the first movie. They are not popular children's books where I am.

[liv]

I don't think I'd really expect the books to be popular in non-Anglo cultures; even Australia, Canada and the US I don't know how popular they are compared to Britain where basically all children read them. I'm sorry for talking as if realizing about the allegory in Narnia was a universal experience, when really it's only a common experience for people with a similar cultural background to mine.

[yvi]

I only had problems with the OICCU reference :-)

Children's books really vary a lot between countries - I don't think there's much overlap except for maybe Harry Potter. I read The Princess Bride when I was 22, for example.

[(Anonymous)]

I'm from the US, I think most of my friends have read at least TLTW&TW. I read the entire series in kindergarten and watched all the BBC productions. We even did it as a school production one year when I was maybe 11 or 12. The only problem was that it was a secular school, so Santa was a no-no (this would probably not have been a problem at a public school, only a lefty secular private school). Santa became Mother Solstice. Some kids did some research, found out the whole story was a Christian allegory, and came back to say, what is wrong with you adults that you say we can't have Christian things in our play, but are stupid enough to have us stage a production of a play that's all about Christianity?

I was pretty amused at how clever we were, and remain appalled at the idiocy of the adults involved. I'm also still very sad at having learned that the books were all about Christianity, because that sort of ruined them for me. We also read his Space Trilogy in high school (at an Anglican school), and that stripped away any remaining warm fuzzies I could have ever had for Lewis. Somewhere in between the "Nazis are all sadistic lesbians" and "heterosexuality and good Christian patriarchy will kill the bad guys", my childhood sort of threw in the towel.

[(Anonymous)]

Oops, clarification--it should, in theory, be banned to have Santa anywhere in a US public school, save on an individual child's t-shirt or notebook or whatever. However, in practice, most schools have Christmas parties and tell the kids to color in Santa pictures or whatever. I think this is a violation of the separation of church and state, but they don't ask me about this stuff.

[wychwood]

I'm a counter-example to the ML discussion, in that I read the Narnia books multiple times for years before I ever actually noticed the allegory. I think I started reading them around age 7ish, and I was probably ten or eleven, maybe even older, before I registered it.

Also: in my experience OICCU was populated almost entirely by jerks, most of whom wanted to convert me because everyone knows that Catholics aren't actually Christian... they refused to let our assistant chaplain join on that basis, I believe.

[liv]

Huh, I wonder if being Catholic kind of inoculated you against noticing the allegory. But it's good that you were able to enjoy the stories as stories.

I definitely agree that OICCU was full of jerks. I knew a lot of Protestants who ended up joining CathSoc or MethSoc cos they wanted a non-jerky Christian environment. My point is that I don't really hold Lewis responsible for what infiltrated Christian Unions do with his writing. My impression is that the American Christianist cults who run groups like OICCU thought that lots of quoting Lewis would be a good strategy because people would remember the Narnia books fondly from childhood, but that had the opposite effect on me because I kind of associate Narnia with being bullied by a wrong-headed Christian.

[wychwood]

Huh, I wonder if being Catholic kind of inoculated you against noticing the allegory.

I've wondered that myself - maybe I'm going to be less susceptible to confusion over eg the Lion -> Lamb transformation at the end of Dawn Treader because lamb imagery is all over? I don't know.

My impression is that the American Christianist cults who run groups like OICCU thought that lots of quoting Lewis would be a good strategy because people would remember the Narnia books fondly from childhood, but that had the opposite effect on me because I kind of associate Narnia with being bullied by a wrong-headed Christian.

As ever, broad-brush techniques based on assuming that everyone has the same background and "real" beliefs fails! Shocking revelation!

I'm sorry that happened to you, anyway.

[marymac]

I also failed at noticing the allegory until we were actually being taught about allegory in P7. And then I was a wee bit peeved, because really. That's a very boring thing to be doing with an otherwise interesting story.

For a voracious reader in a convent school, I'm not sure how I managed that, really.

The joy of going to a godless college was that the CU got kicked out of the Union on a regular basis for annoying people.

[liv]

Wow, the godless college kicking out the CU sounds awesome, I would have felt very satisfied if that had happened. I know that some of the CUs have got into trouble with breaching equalities law due to their treatment of LGBT+ people, but that's rather more recent than when I was at uni.

And yes, I definitely relate to thinking that retelling bits of the Gospels is a boring thing to do with a cool fantasy world. It does seem to be a common theme that it's less transparent to people from a Catholic background.

[marymac]

Queen's is hilariously weird in many ways (see dominance of DUP in the SU causing three years and a court case for Ba'hai Society to get recognised) but the porters used to quite gleefully exercise their right to kick the religious off the campus should they take the piss. Definition of 'taking the piss' generally coming down to 'people are in my office complaining, make it stop'.

Current VC seems to be more wishy washy, as the Muslim Society are whining about not having a prayer room and he's making agreeing noises, which deeply angers me, as ferocious enforcement of our godless status is one of the things that made QUB a decent place, given the context.

Re: the Catholics being a bit slow - I wonder if it's because at the same formative age we're reading Narnia we're also reading a million saint's lives as well. So we're more used to random acts of martyrdom than average, probably.

[alextiefling]

For what it's worth, I've never met a university chaplain who was not more or less openly opposed to the resident Christian Union. They make the ministry of chaplaincy very difficult in several ways.

[highlyeccentric]

I was given the books at a Christian school, so my chances of innocence were limited. I don't think I spotted the allegory IMMEDIATELY, but within a year of me reading LWW we were being fed the BBC made-for-TV movies with explicit (and insufferable) smug proselytising. I kept reading, because fantasy! Wheee!, but eventually that spoiled my enjoyment of the whole series.

I *cannot* handle the Screwtape Letters, although I cognitively recognise they are very funny and influenced things I do like (eg: Good Omens). But I know too many people who read it as an actual guide to demonic goings-on. I've had the Screwtape Letters quoted at me as evangelical material to remedy my stubborn refusal to believe that demons cause, eg, the common headcold.

[liv]

I don't remember the BBC films very well, and you're the second person to note that they made the Christian stuff more obvious than the books did. I can just imagine that having the books pressed on you specifically as Christian tracts would spoil them in a different way from suddenly realizing what's going on.

I must admit it never occurred to me to take the demons in The Screwtape letters literally! I assumed it was all metaphors for the nature of temptation and how to resist it. But ugh, yes, if people were trying to use Lewis to make you believe in demons, that would be very offputting indeed.

[highlyeccentric]

Of course they're all metaphors - although sometimes informed by medieval writers who really did believe in demons, because Lewis was a well-read chappy. But if you're stuck in a plain-text reading of the bible, and you have this here Christian Book by a Christian Author, how else are you going to read it except literally? If you start countenancing *metaphors* you might have to think critically about the bible and we can't have that. (Allegory, for some reason, is easier to process.)

[alextiefling]

Taking Screwtape literally seems very weird to me - essentially completely culturally illiterate. Screwtape demands to be read in the laconic, ironical tones of someone like Sir Humphrey Appleby. I'm not sure how anyone could believe them to have been written by someone who literally believed in demons.

[mc776]

I think "evangelical material to remedy my stubborn refusal to believe that demons cause, eg, the common headcold" goes quite beyond just believing in the actual existence of demons (which I believe Lewis did, even though Screwtape itself may be wholly fictional satire rather than a serious revelatory account).

That ev[dys]angelist's use of the book seems as much of an abuse of text as if they'd actually gone around thumping people over the head with a Bible.

[seekingferret]

I never read Narnia as a child- I read LWW and PC in my early twenties, already having been told it was an allegory. The pump having been so primed, it was obvious that it was an allegory, and not one I found very interesting.

I told my mother I was reading LWW for the first time and she seemed surprised that she hadn't given them to me as a child, since she had read them as a child, and since as a children's librarian, she was usually my pusher. But I don't think it's really all that surprising... I don't think I would have loved the books as a child, either.

[liv]

There are definitely worse children's books to read as an adult, but I don't think even tLtW&tW really stands up if you're old enough to see the scaffolding. It is somewhat surprising that your mother as a librarian didn't offer you the books, but then she probably had access to much more modern stuff. I think a lot of our generation end up reading Narnia because our parents were nostalgic about it.

[seekingferret]

Yeah, no, she offered me plenty of modern children's books, and often used me as a tester for new books she wanted to know if she should recommend, but she definitely also made a point to expose me to the significant books of her childhood, so LWW seems rather an oversight.

I kind of think that the books hadn't really resonated with her because of their Christianity, and she had some subconscious sense that the series wasn't really for us, even if she didn't necessarily have some strong intellectual belief that she should keep Christian message books away from me (and in fact generally believed in exposing me to every sort of idea and giving me access to any kind of book).

[starlady]

I was halfheartedly raised Catholic, but Quakerism was and is my religious context of choice; I had to get a friend to explain the Christian allegory to me in high school. At which point I thought that C.S. Lewis really hadn't done what he had tried to do.

[liv]

There are definitely situations where I have to get friends to explain some Christian background to me. But I think Lewis wasn't trying to convert Quaker children, I think was trying to help children who already basically believed in his sort of Christianity to understand the NT stories better. But I can completely see where his allegory is both too opaque and too obvious.

Also, what an amazingly appropriate icon!

[starlady]

I don't actually think Lewis does a very good job of the allegory. Through several vagaries of my education I have a very strong background in Christian theology, and Lewis's beliefs are profoundly idiosyncratic to say the least--"his sort of Christianity" really wasn't and isn't very common. (I have a Jewish friend who went to Montessori school who says it most closely resembles the Theosophy-influenced beliefs of that system.) It's also very common for people to completely miss the Christian aspects of Narnia, as I did, which to me says that he wasn't really very effective at his purpose--which is not to say they aren't there; they obviously are, and there's a reason that adults keep giving them to children as Christian books.

But basically, I wrote a whole bunch of posts going very deeply into Narnia when I did a reread a few years ago, and my fundamental conclusion was that Narnia is in tension with itself over precisely this issue. In some ways I think Tolkien is actually much, much more Christian--he's certainly much more Catholic, and for my money his legendarium is far more soaked in an explicitly Christian worldview in some ways than is Narnia.

(I went through a minor obsession around the time of the rereads. I have many, many icons.)

[alextiefling]

Would it be worth my while posting a similar question about Tolkien, do you think? I certainly feel his work is more deeply and consistently Christian (and specifically Catholic) than Lewis's [I]mutatis mutandis[/I].

[toothycat]

I was brought up Christian, and still am. I have always loved fantasy, and I read the Narnia books very young. I didn't get the allegory at all. When I was a bit older - still younger than 10, I think - I read Prince Caspian (for the nth time) and very belatedly worked out what had happened. I went to my mum nearly in tears because I thought CS Lewis had done a bad thing for making Aslan like Jesus. My mum was probably trying not to laugh while explaining that was what he intended to do.

I think my favourites now are TMN and TH&HB, and also TVotDT, just for the dreamlike weirdness of the latter half of the book. I personally don't mind the allegory, but I'm not sure I'd recommend it to anyone without a warning of what it was about. I find it really quite unsubtle. I think your comments that it was intended for children brought up in a Christian environment are spot-on, actually, and quite helpful for my understanding of what Lewis was trying to do.

As for TLB, the pictures of Tash in my edition gave me nightmares - my mum taped white paper over them so I could read it. It never got quite as much reading as the others did!

[liv]

Really interesting thoughts, thank you! I think it's quite likely for a knowledgeable Christian child to miss the allegory, just from being young enough at the time of reading not to be thinking at that level of sophistication. I can relate to thinking it's a bad thing to put God into a fantasy story, it seems sort of trivializing or almost blasphemous, somehow.

And yes, it does seem much kinder to offer the books to children with the explanation that they're versions of the Christian story, so that the readers don't feel betrayed when they work it out. Dreamlike weirdness is very much one of Lewis' strengths, which is in many ways why he is more successful as a fantasy writer than a theologian.

[melannen]

I don't remember if I ever didn't know that Aslan was supposed to be Jesus? I think I was a bit older than many of you when I got around to them - 9-10 - and I was raised in a household where Mom was an active, liberal Christian and Dad might be studying anything from Taoism to Islam to Liberation Theology on any given day. If I didn't know they were a Christian allegory when I started, I was informed as soon as I mentioned anything about them to Dad.

...also I immediately recognized Aslan's sacrifice in LWW as a Christ metaphor even if I didn't recognize the story as a Christian allegory overall, but I recognized it as a poorly done Christ metaphor? My church was really big on teaching kids actual bible text and pretty sophisticated theology early on, plus I'd already read fantasy novels that had much better-done Christ metaphors (it's not like they're hard to find in fantasy) so when Aslan just came back I was mostly like "well, that was pointless". I did end up reading a couple of the others because they were around the house and they had dragons and friends were really into them but I still haven't read most of them and I never got as far as TLB.

It sucks that you had to go through that. :/ fwiw anyone who puts a ton of stock in Lewis' theology immediately loses my respect too - Screwtape was fun 'cause it was meant to be shallow, although not nearly as good as Twain's Letters from the Earth that I read at the same time, and all the rest of his writing I've read just annoys me at how self-congratulatorily shallow and culturally smug it is.

[liv]

Right, so you were older and pretty religiously knowledgeable. I'm impressed with tiny!Melannen's critical insight in seeing tLtW&tW as a poor version of the Christian story. I really think there's a lot to be said for teaching children real religion and not cute baby Jesus / old man in the sky type of stories, even if it meant you ended up too cynical for Narnia.

It's interesting that you lose respect for people who take Lewis' theology too seriously. I'm not putting a high priority on reading his writings, though I accept he gets quoted out of context a lot. I feel like a lot of what he's doing is writing apologetics, he's not really trying to convince other people to become Christian, more to convince himself that what he emotionally wants to believe is justified. And that sort of writing often is shallow and self-congratulatory.

[melannen]

His Christianity is a very different sort than mine, perhaps I should leave it at that. :P (I have been told that I might like some of his later stuff more - that after he married a Jewish divorcee and she pointed out that he had his head up his ass, he got a little better on some things - but it's not really a high priority!)

And I wouldn't even say I was all that cynical (yet)! But our church's teaching was really big on Christ being fully human when he died (a human who was also fully God, yes, but--), and on the sacrifice changing everything, but also that it only had power because it was a real death of a real human -- it meant he gave up everything that was part of his life on Earth, forever, and maybe he could come back and say Hi but his friends didn't even recognize him anymore and nothing was the same. So my reaction was basically that if he is a magical glowy Lion who just wanders back up same as ever if you kill him, you are epically missing the point of the Crucifixion.

...heck, Dr. Who Sparkly Tinkerbell Jesus did it better, and I don't think I've ever said that about Sparkly Tinkerbell Jesus before.

I suspect Lewis thought that doing the Crucifixion properly would be too much for kids, in which case he didn't just miss the point of Christ, he missed the point of kids...

(I was also completely freaked out by the "They lived their entire lives as kings and queens and then had to go back and pretend nothing had changed" bit too. I shouldn't give the impression that the Jesus thing was the main reason I noped out. I mostly noped out about the "they had to go back and pretend to be kids and Lewis though it would actually work? And this was a good thing rather than incredibly creepy? WTF!"

...although perhaps that is also related to him missing the point of sacrifice. And of kids.)

[khalinche]

I'm so sorry about your teacher. What a shitty thing for an authority figure and trusted person to do.

I don't come from a Christian household but my first primary school teacher was quite dedicated to Christianity and perhaps that had an influence on her choice to have us read the books at school. However, the allegory went completely over my head at the time.

Aged about 18 or 19, I was living in the USA doing odd jobs in university summer vacations. I had picked up some work on a farm and was harvesting salad greens with the other workers, one of whom was a very tall and rather innocent lad, with that well-scrubbed, impeccable-manners, denim-overall-and-straw-hat lay missionary kind of vibe. I don't remember how we started talking about C.S Lewis but he recommended 'Mere Christianity' as a book to read to understand his religious outlook. I must have said something like, 'What, the Narnia guy' and then he explained about the allegory. I remember it vividly, standing in the middle of the rows of lettuce thinking, 'OHHH!'.

I remember that the other person working with us was someone whose family I lived with at the time - I was their live-in babysitter - and he was orphaned quite young in Colombia and quite possibly brought up under the 'guidance' of monks or nuns, and when we got onto the subject of Christianity he quickly became quite angry and rude, which I found surprising, as he was generally mellow to a fault. I felt a bit sorry for the lay missionary guy. Myself, I felt a bit betrayed that these books which I had really enjoyed actually had some other message in them and I had a little bit of the disappointment you describe - I was also bullied later, in another school, partly for not being a churchgoing Christian. Or at least if not outright bullied, certainly it was regarded as weird and suspicious. So there was also a sense of the thing being taken away, sort of, that they had been intended for 'good' children and not for people like me.

[liv]

Thank you for sympathy! The thing is that I lost trust in this teacher the first time she screamed at me and just barely stopped short of physical violence, possibly because I had an asthma attack in her class, but it might have been some other equally inappropriate reason, so basically everything else she did just confirmed my opinion that she was incompetent. I think I never really trusted her enough to feel betrayed.

I do feel bad for you over the religiously intolerant bullying, that's a shared experience I would never wish for :-( And the poor Colombian guy! I am extremely conscious that for all the positive influence of religion in my life, religious people and religious institutions have perpetrated some really appalling abuse against many of the people I know, and I do often wonder whether it's right for me to continue to be part of those structures and systems.

And thank you for your as ever vivid story of when you found out. When there's a long time between reading the books as great stories and realizing that they weren't meant for you, I can see that feels like something taken away.

[crystalpyramid]

I'm feeling very much like the odd one out here. I enjoyed Narnia as a child, maybe didn't recognize the Aslan sacrifice thing as obviously Christlike but did recognize a lot of the other preachy theology stuff as being extremely relevant to Christianity. Only Lewis's version of Christianity was so much more generous than the version my mom was trying to impose on me (yay America and fundamentalism) that for a long time my take on Narnia and Christianity was "I wish Christianity was as kind in real life as it is in Narnia". No betrayal; for all their many faults the Catholics are kinder and more thoughtful than many of the fundamentalist protestants.

[alextiefling]

You do know Lewis was an Anglican rather than a Catholic?

[crystalpyramid]

Oh, getting him mixed up with Tolkien. They're a pretty similar distance from how I was raised, though. And I don't think I really understood the difference until college, which was also when I first met Anglicans.

[kerrypolka]

Sorry, this is a really stupid question, but aren't Anglicans Catholic (just not Roman Catholic)? Or if not, what does Anglo-Catholic mean?

[alextiefling]

That's what I get for using someone else's shorthand!

Whether Anglicans are Catholic or not is a vexed question:

According to the Roman Catholic church, Anglicans are a Reformation-era 'ecclesial community', and thus not really a church at all - they apply the title only to themselves, their immediate associates the 'particular Catholic' churches such as the Maronites, and (since Vatican II) the Orthodox churches.

According to the vast majority of Anglican thought, the Anglican Communion is catholic (small c) in the sense of being part of the worldwide church, as expressed in the Nicene Creed. But Anglo-Catholics (like me) go further than that and say that the Anglican Communion is Catholic in exactly the sense that the Roman Catholic Church describes itself and the particular Catholic churches as being. The dispute is officially about whether the right bishops put their hands on the right heads during the Reformation, but more substantially is about whether or not a reformed church should be recognised as a church by Rome.

[liv]

I'm sorry you feel left out, and especially that you grew up in an unkind fundamentalist context. I don't think it's a totally uncommon story, that people, especially children, have Lewis pushed on them as propaganda for Christianity but like Lewis' version of Christianity a lot better than the kind that is very pushy about trying to make people believe.

And yes, as Alex points out, Lewis was Anglican, not Catholic. But we never had a proper Reformation here so Anglicanism isn't all that Protestant and definitely not Lutheran. I can definitely see that Lewis' "mere" Christianity is closer to Catholicism than to American style fundamentalist / Evangelical Protestantism.

[crystalpyramid]

I don't know if my mom was or is aware that Lewis is Christian propaganda, actually. I think she was thinking of it purely as fantasy novels to read to her children.

[rmc28]

I'm so sorry you had a teacher bully you for not being Christian :(

I was raised in a mixture of Quakerism and Church of England, and I read all of the Narnia books repeatedly except the Last Battle (because it's horrible and has a horrible ending), and I utterly failed to notice any of the allegory until some time in my late teens. I don't even remember exactly when I realised it, but I'm pretty certain it was from a comment by a friend and me going "... you're right, it totally is, isn't it?"

We have a set of the books on the children's shelves, but I haven't reread them recently.

[liv]

That teacher really shouldn't have been teaching and indeed left the profession a few years after she was my class teacher, I think to become some kind of missionary or similar. I think the root of the problem was that she felt intellectually threatened by me (and I was rising eight, which makes her pretty pathetic), and my questioning her religious beliefs was only part of that.

Interesting that you also missed the allegory until you were a bit older and your friend pointed it out to you. Not rereading The Last Battle was a very good choice! And perhaps you should tell your kids there are only six books in the series... (Not in a lying way, but in a fannish tradition of pretending the bad sequels never happened.)

[solitarywalker]

i had the books as a box set, as a child. i probably read them all, certainly the first few anyway, though i don't know how much i understood them. At some point later on i was told CS Lewis was a Christian essayist, i recognized the name and said Didn't he write...?, and learnt that those books were Christian too. By then, either the things i remembered from the books didn't strike me as overtly Christian, or i didn't remember the books well enough to be able to think of things to point to.

It was more exciting when i discovered that the astronomy book i had by AA Milne was by the same person who wrote the Pooh books. Really? It's the same person? It took some convincing to make me accept that they weren't written by two different people who happened to have the same name. Of course i was much younger then than when i learnt about Lewis.

[liv]

Yes, it's kind of lovely that AA Milne wrote an astronomy book. Like that story of Queen Victoria asking for more by Lewis Caroll and being given Dodgson's mathematical treatises. I do really think there's a sweet spot for reading Lewis, when you're old enough to enjoy the story but young enough not to think about the allegorical meanings.

[siderea]

This is one of those Here In Siderealand things.

I read in publication order, and – I'm surprised nobody else mentions this – had a grunch of exclusion when I got to Father Christmas in LWW. I kind of sighed over it and rolled my eyes, and figured (I was about 9 at the time) that the author must simply be so religiously provincial it didn't occur to him that Christmas was a holiday specific to Christians. I mean, my literal first thought was, "Oh, come on, Narnia has Jesus in it? Do they have their own Jesus or did the one in this world suffice to die for their sins? *eyeroll*"

Also, apparently unlike everybody else, I didn't think Aslan's sacrifice in LWW was notably Christ-like, because I was already well-aware that self-sacrificing deathless kings are not a meme owned by Christianity. Also, Aslan gives up himself to save one person, not many, which did not seem at all analogous to me.

But I eventually got to the end of the VotDT, the bit with the Lion and the Lamb, and like a lot of people, had a lightbulb go on.

It's just that in my case, it was a slightly different lightbulb.

I thought: "Holy crap, Lewis thinks Aslan's supposed to be Jesus... and he's wrong."

It took me a very long time to get the language to explain the incongruity I was observing. Adulthood really. But what I was twigging to was that the archetypes don't match.

Lewis thought he was channeling the Christian savior into the character of Aslan. He was channeling a god, alright. Just not that one.

You know that bit about good Tash worshippers actually being unwitting Aslan worshippers? Just like that: people, including Lewis, who think that in adoring Aslan they're adoring Jesus, are actually adoring some other god. Some older, quite pagan, god.

So, that's when I knew that they're supposed to be about Christianity. But where was I when I understood that the Narnia books are about Christianity? Oh, I haven't ever understood any such thing.

[alextiefling]

I have real problems with telling anyone they're not following the religion they think they are. It's one of the things that I find troubling about the presentation of Tash in TLB (as opposed to in TH&HB, where Lewis effectively replicates a whole bunch of medieval bullshit about Islam).

[mc776]

Well, if I were to meet someone who thought God was telling them to torture, rape, enslave and murder their way into a heavenly reward of infinite sex and booze, the only thing between me and telling them their god is nothing but a devil dragging them into damnation is my own cowardice (and possibly by that point his knife between my neck vertebrae while they're filming the whole thing for Daesh's next funniest home video).

Somewhat less extremely, someone who would bully and shame someone for not "being a Christian" is clearly not speaking truth in love, and by alienating people from the faith in a petty, hate-inspiring and not-martyr-creating way may be even more effective in serving their true master than the daeshole terrorist.

Besides, I think she's got a real good point - especially if the starting assumption is that "Jesus" is the Jesus of the sort of Christianity in which Santa Claus is the main symbol around the time of the north-winter solstice.

(sorry if I seem to be stalking you - I'm just going down all these many comments and replying as I see things worth replying to.)

[liv]

Not surprisingly, I really like this comment, thank you!

I definitely have had a similar reaction to SF or fantasy books where Christian symbols show up and have no reasonable basis in the worldbuilding, but I don't remember being that bothered by Father Christmas, I think because Narnia seemed to be connected to our world in a way that follows magical rather than logical rules, it's not like an alien planet or a completely independent secondary world.

And I'm impressed at your youthful knowledge of self-sacrificing deathless kings as a mythological trope .And that you recognized what I've heard from a lot of adult commentators about Lewis really being in sympathy with rather Pagan thought, even though he really strongly wanted to identify as Christian.

[ewx]

Where: probably at university, but I can't really remember. I don't think it can have made much impact. There are perfectly good stories in there and the fact that they turn out to have a relationship to other (to me) fictional works doesn't make much difference.
We did have one schoolteacher who seemed to have a (comparatively minor) problem with beliefs he didn't shared. The bit that stands out is calling JWs and Mormons 'cults' in RE lessons about them, in context obviously in one of the negative sense of the word. There was some kind of argument with some overtly atheist pupils that I don't recall any details of.

[liv]

Makes sense that you weren't bothered by finding out the relationship between the Narnia stories and the Christian myth, especially as an adult.

That RE teacher sounds annoying; I had quite a few similar experiences, where the curriculum included various "world religions" but CoE-style Christianity was assumed to be the default and basically the right answer, and everything else was taught in relationship to that.

[ewx]

I don't remember the same guy dissing Islam, actually, and I'm pretty certain he'd have done a lesson or two on it, in the same year. Maybe the much greater difference between that and CoE Christianity meant he could approach it more dispassionately.

[quizcustodiet]

I was raised Catholic. My father read TLtWatW to us when I was about 7, and I didn't get the allegory then. A couple of years later he read the entire series to us, and I noticed the allegory then.

Having been raised within the broader Catholic context (and spotting it relatively young) I didn't feel betrayed, though I did feel a bit dim for not having noticed the first time through.

Even as a Catholic, I bounced hard off TLB, both because of the troubling salvation stuff at the end but primarily because the first three-quarters of it are just an incoherent mess of a book.

I reread them again while at University, and really struggled with the racism and colonialism in VotDT: in particular, there's a really hideous scene where the "wise wizard" governing an island full of "primitive" people explains how difficult he finds living with such morons, but how it is worth it for him because he knows that at some time in the very far future they may become properly civilized people.

[liv]

I am really fascinated by all the comments from friends coming from Catholic backgrounds, it seems like readers in that situation are responding quite differently from either Protestants or people who aren't Christian at all. And yeah, I think The Last Battle just fails as a story, even before you get into arguing with its theology.

I haven't in fact reread Lewis as an adult and I'm not surprised there was some racism fairy effect going on. I was reading a lot of quite old-fashioned children's books at the time and I was mostly used to the idea of "primitive" people being one of the experiences protagonists would encounter on their fantastic journeys. Doesn't make it ok, but I'm fairly sure Dawn Treader wouldn't have stood out from the background.

[alextiefling]

FWIW I have posted a related question about Tolkien on my own DW.

[sunflowerinrain]

I didn't read the Narnia books until after studying Lewis' science fiction trilogy at school, so I already knew about the Christianity pervading his books. Would I have realised if I'd read them at a younger age? Hard to tell. There wasn't much Christianity around my upbringing, so probably not - but I'm sure I'd have noticed the strong religious aspect.

[liv]

That makes sense, given you didn't really grow up in a Christian context. I think when I was a kid I wouldn't have recognized "religion" in general, I didn't really distinguish it from other sorts of fantasy / magic / numinous. But certainly once you've read the SF trilogy you can't not know that Lewis is all about explaining Christianity in the form of stories.

[mc776]

Hi, some-time on-and-off lurker, first time commenter (not that, having read the other comments and replied, this is at all my first comment).

Sorry to hear about that clueless teacher - and the almost equally clueless people who wouldn't think such a thing would happen! (I don't think I'm that much older than you (if I even am) and the stuff I heard growing up would get people scrambling for the smelling salts nowadays...)

where were you when you understood that the Narnia books are about Christianity? Or did you always know?

We had to do a unit on LWW in fifth grade. I have no recollection when I learned that Aslan was an allegory for Jesus, but I remember it being already in the back of my mind by the time we even got to the point of the Stone Table.

(Background: I was being brought up and raised as an Evangelical, and was already no longer believing by fifth grade - my overall first impression of the book was quite negative about its message, albeit with a few very bright spots with the vividness of Lewis' descriptions - I loved the White Witch, was amused at the lion who was going around with the "us lions" schtick, and identified very much with pre-battle Edmund for years. While I did get and enjoy a few snippets of SC in my teens and mid twenties (I am an avid non-reader and non-finisher of books -_-), it would be many years before I'd pick up OOTSP after being inspired by that Iron Maiden song, then discover the Screwtape Letters and have it be one of the many, many things (the manyness itself being among them) that ended up eventually pointing me back to Christianity, albeit in an utterly different understanding of it than the one I grew up with. So anyway, yeah the Narnia books are definitely more preaching to the choir in my mind than reaching out to the unchurched.)

To add to siderea's point, some of us (including probably Lewis himself) would consider the ancient pagan god him/her/them/hir/itself to be a shadow of the real Jesus - who, in turn, is to that great pagan god what that god is to the watered-down, misunderstood, n-minus-one-dimensional "Jesus" preached by the college Christian Union types.

[liv]

Hello, welcome, and thank you for your interesting and thoughtful comments. And it sounds like you've had quite the religious trajectory. I agree, Lewis' imagery is much more appealing than the message. I had no idea there was an Iron Maiden song, so thanks for bringing that to my attention!

And it's interesting that Lewis was part of what helped you to reconnect with Christianity. I think I mostly see what you mean about shadows; college Christian Unions are particularly shallow but I don't really expect anybody to be able to understand God more than the vaguest of shadows, not by thinking about or describing God anyway.

[ephemera]

I grew up in a church-going family, and am dyslexic so got the Narnia fairly late compared to many of your comentators, by which point it's Christian allegory was pretty obvious, and I think the reason I never loved the books was that I didn't really *like* most of the children, so there was never that "love betrayed" moment. I actually preferred the Screwtape Letters, of Lewis' books.

[liv]

Right, having a Christian background plus coming to the books a bit older I can see would make it a lot less of a surprise. It's hard to remember now but I'm pretty sure I loved the world and the story more than the specific characters; I always felt like Lewis loved Lucy a little too much, and most of the other kids are pretty annoying. It perhaps works better if you regard them as allegorical types rather than characters, but still.

[steorra]

I grew up Protestant Christian.

When I was little, I refused to read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe because I thought it must be evil because it had a witch in it. My parents tried to convince me that it was okay, and probably explained the Christian symbolism, but I didn't believe them. It was only when I watched video with my family of a combined Prince Caspian and the Voyage of the Dawn Treader (BBC?) that I thought ~hey, this is good~, and then went and read the book.

So I think I knew about the Christian symbolism before I even started reading it, but didn't initially think the book could be actually compatible with Christianity...and that idea was not coming from elders telling me that it was incompatible with Christianity, but from my own childhood interpretation of how things fit together.

Just to throw an odd case into your mix ...