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

[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.

[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.

[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).

[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.

[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...)

[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.

[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.)

[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]

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.

[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.

[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.)

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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?

[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.

[(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.

[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]

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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.