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

[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.

[yvi]

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

[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.

[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.

[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!

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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].

[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.

[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.

[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.