Hi class! Here is a neat article I found about the Narnia series as allegory. I'm enjoying our unit as we discover the similarities between the gospel of Jesus and the novel. See you tomorrow.
Recently, I was chatting with my friend Summer. She's never read
C. S. Lewis's great apologetics for the Christian faith, "Mere Christianity."
Nor has she read his conversion story, "Surprised by Joy," or his
adult fiction, or his essays of literary criticism. But she did, years ago as a
kid, read his "Chronicles of Narnia," at about the same time she read
"Anne of Green Gables" and "Nancy Drew." "Now, I know
these Narnias are supposed to be Christian allegory, but I never saw anything
Christian about them," she told me. "Frankly, I'm not sure I see them
as much more religious than Anne or Nancy."
My friend is not alone.
Part of what distinguishes the Narnia series is that it can be read on so many
different levels. Setting aside any religious interpretation, it's still just a
heck of a good tale.
Nonetheless, a deeply
Christian vision shapes Narnia. The most unmistakably Christian trope in
"The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe"-- Lewis's famous novel about
four British children who find themselves in a magical land called Narnia where
they meet witches and fauns and a wonderful lion called Aslan--is Aslan's death
and resurrection. In order to save one of the children from death at the hands
of the evil White Witch, Aslan allows himself to be killed upon a great Stone
Table. The "crucifiers" mock him, just as Jesus was mocked:
"Why, he's only a great cat after all!"; "Poor Puss! Poor
Pussy.... How many mice have you caught today, Cat?" These jeers, of
course, recall the soldiers' cry to Jesus:
If you are king of the Jews, save yourself!
The resurrected Aslan
then reappears to Lucy and Susan. The girls, of course, are taken aback--Susan
fears that she is seeing a ghost. But Lucy realizes this is no specter:
"Oh, you're real, you're real! Oh, Aslan!" she cries. And Aslan
explains that while the White Witch's magic is powerful, there is a deeper,
truer, more powerful magic at work--and now that an innocent and willing victim
was killed in the intended victim's place, "Death itself would start
working backward."
That phrase is about as
concise a summary of the Gospel message as one could hope for. Yet the story of
Aslan is so engrossing in itself that readers understandably don't always make
the connection. Pauline Baynes, who illustrated the first edition of The
Chronicles, says she wept while creating the illustration for this scene--but
she didn't realize until later that Aslan's death mirrored Christ's suffering
on the cross.
The entire Chronicles
follow biblical contours. If in "The Lion, the Witch, and the
Wardrobe" we have a retelling of Christ's suffering, death, and
resurrection, the subsequent Narnia stories tell about the children's
adventures in Narnia--their adventures, that is, during the time between
Aslan's redemption of Narnia, and his final victory. This is, from the
Christian viewpoint, the very same in-between time in which we are living now.
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