Anyone who knows anything about The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis knows that it’s full of Christian symbolism. With only a little prodding, my five- and six-year old sons picked up on the connection between Aslan and Christ right away, and all sorts of other connections took off from there.
Some of our comparisons worked beautifully.
In The Magician’s Nephew, the first chronological book in the series, C.S. Lewis has Aslan create Narnia by singing everything into existence. As His song emanates from His lion mouth, a beautiful landscape unfolds out of the darkness, and it soon teems with all sorts of creatures—even mythical ones like talking unicorns and fauns and satyrs. I found this a stunning visual to go along with John 1:1 which says, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”
I spend a lot of time breaking down the meaning of that verse with my middle school students. We talk about how the “Word” refers to Jesus as well as the Logic that God imprinted in Creation. Then we slice and dice it a myriad of other ways and drive it home with some reminders about how the Breath used in speaking the Word represents the Holy Spirit. It’s a very analytical and (I hope) engaging lesson.
But it pales in comparison to “listening” to Aslan’s song. It’s not that the fictional images are better than the real ones, per se. It’s that they do the work of imagining for us, and they do so in such a way that makes them very appealing and accessible for young minds. By putting the (Lion) skin on the Word, Lewis made it very easy for his readers to see how the Word was made Flesh. In the context of reading the story with my sons, I was able to express some of the same ideas I cover with my much older students, and they were able to dialogue right back with me, young though they are. It was a very simple conversation, but it felt like they understood and internalized the ideas because they could picture it all.
By the time we got to The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, the connection between Aslan and Christ was even more obvious. Like Christ, Aslan gives His life to save His people. He lets the White Witch kill Him in order to save Edmund’s life, who, by the way, doesn’t seem to really deserve it. (The implications for humanity are pretty humbling, to say the least.) Also like Christ, Aslan comes back to life and defeats the White Witch.
But not all the comparisons we tried to make between characters in Narnia and figures in the Bible worked as well:
For example, if you try to make the White Witch out as the Devil, you’re going to have some trouble. Yes, she’s evil. Yes, she’s a temptress. But, she is not so in a penultimate way. Reading the whole series makes it clear that she is one of a long cast of villains. In short, she is only like the Devil in as much as all things evil are.
It turns out, my kids and I weren’t the only ones trying to match things up and failing at times. After I finished reading The Chronicles of Narnia, I read Letters to Children by C.S. Lewis. As the title suggests, it consists of letters he wrote in response to fan mail from children, some of whom maintained many years of correspondence and even gained the privilege of book dedications.
Lewis explained to a fifth grade class in Maryland, “You are mistaken when you think that everything in the books ‘represents’ something in the world…I did not say to myself ‘Let us represent Jesus as He really is in our world by a Lion in Narnia’: I said ‘Let us suppose that there were a land like Narnia and that the Son of God, as He became a Man in our world, became a Lion there, and then imagine what would happen.’ If you think about it, you will see that is quite a different thing.”
In another collected work called On Stories and Essays, C.S. Lewis goes on to criticize the idea of allegory, saying, “No story can be devised by the wit of man which cannot be interpreted allegorically by the wit of some other man…the mere fact that you can allegorise the work before you is of itself no proof that it is an allegory. Of course you can allegorise it. You can allegorise anything, whether in art or real life.”
I think we owe it to C.S. Lewis to take him at his word. The Chronicles of Narnia are not an allegory. They may tell a story of salvation; it’s just not The Story of Salvation. The one certainly reflects the other but is not beholden to it—except in the character of Aslan. He alone is a true match. He is Christ, the Lion of Judah. (Incidentally, I also learned from one of his letters that the name for Aslan was taken from the Turkish word for lion.)
So you may be wondering if C.S. Lewis’s suppositional approach confounds things too much for a little child.
As a one-time child reading The Chronicles of Narnia and now as a mother reading them to my own children, I think they appeal to the imagination in a way that colors and accents The Story of Salvation. After all, the central Truth, or Logos, of that story is less about the details of each event and more about the salvation it offers, of which C.S. Lewis bears witness beautifully.
