4 The Lord and the Lion: C.S. Lewis on Aslan and the Christian Life
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The Lord and the Lion: C.S. Lewis on Aslan and the Christian Life
‘Aslan,’ said Lucy, ‘you’re bigger.’
‘That is because you are older, little one,’ answered he.
‘Not because you are?’
‘I am not. But every year you grow, you will find me bigger.’
C.S. Lewis, Prince Caspian
Bonnie Tyler’s hit ‘Holding Out for a Hero’ struck a deep chord with many people when it came out in 1984, especially its best-known line, ‘I need a hero!’ Whom do we look to for inspiration? Who is our role model? We need someone whom we can admire, and who can inspire us to become better people.
Lewis’s deep knowledge of literature helped him reach the same conclusion. The great legends of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table were all about the quest for virtue. They were an inspiration in dark times. And Lewis went on to create his own hero – a very special lion called Aslan.
I was having lunch with some colleagues to talk about a lecture they wanted me to give in London. Their ten-year-old daughter joined us briefly, before we got on to the business part of the discussion. ‘This is Professor McGrath,’ they told her. ‘He knows a lot about C.S. Lewis!’
The girl’s eyes brightened. ‘When you next see him, could you tell him I love Aslan? He’s the most wonderful lion I know. I wish I could know him better.’
She’s not alone. Just about everyone agrees that the noble lion Aslan, the standout character of the Chronicles of Narnia, is probably Lewis’s greatest literary creation. Lewis seems to have begun to write The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe without any clear idea of how its plot and characters would develop. Then Aslan came ‘bounding in’ to Lewis’s imagination, and the narrative took shape. Aslan ‘pulled the whole story together, and soon He pulled the six other Narnian stories in after him’.1 Although the process by which Lewis wrote the seven chronicles of Narnia remains unclear at points, there are good reasons for suggesting that once Lewis devised the central character, Aslan, the novels more or less wrote themselves.
So how did Aslan come ‘bounding in’ to Lewis’s imagination? We can offer several pointers, even if none of them really explains everything. For a start, the image of a lion has played an important role in the Christian theological tradition as an image of Christ, building on the New Testament’s reference to Christ as the ‘Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David’ (Revelation 5:5). And Lewis’s close friend Charles Williams had written a novel titled The Place of the Lion (1931), which Lewis read with interest.
Furthermore, the lion is the traditional symbol associated with Lewis’s childhood church, St Mark’s Anglican Church in Dundela, in the Strandtown area of Belfast. The church’s rectory, which Lewis visited regularly as a child, had a door knocker in the form of a lion’s head. The use of the image of a lion is thus relatively easy to understand, even though Lewis’s development of the idea goes way beyond any of these original ideas.
Aslan plays a pivotal role in Narnia, just as Jesus Christ is central to the Christian faith. Although Aslan is often described as an ‘extended metaphor’ for Jesus Christ, this depiction is unhelpful – not least because it completely fails to recognise the extraordinary power of presence that Aslan exercises within the Chronicles of Narnia, particularly The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, The Magician’s Nephew and The Last Battle. Aslan is no metaphor; he is a living figure who stands at the heart of Lewis’s literary creation. We cannot treat Aslan simply as a symbol or a cipher for something else. We must respect him as a literary creation in his own right, appreciating him for what he is, in addition to reflecting on what he suggests.
Yet while we cannot simply identify Aslan with Christ, Lewis clearly intended us to see a relationship between them. Aslan helps us to think about Jesus Christ by engaging our imagination as much as by informing our reason. Lewis does not tell us what Jesus Christ is like; he shows us what Aslan is like and allows us to take things from there by ourselves. We have to make the connections. Aslan is a character of such imaginative and spiritual depth that many readers of Narnia find themselves drawn to him for reasons they find difficult to put into words. In one sense, Aslan is an imaginative surrogate for Jesus Christ, helping us begin a more serious engagement with the place of Christ in the Christian life.
There is no doubt that Aslan is to be seen as a ‘Christ figure’. Lewis made it clear that this was a complex relationship, best framed in terms of a ‘supposal’: ‘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.’2
So let’s have lunch with Lewis and explore how the figure of Aslan opens up and illuminates some of the core themes of the Christian faith. Let’s begin by looking at a classic objection. What if God is just an invention – something we dreamed up, in order to make life more meaningful and give us hope for the future? Lewis’s response to this question is well worth considering. So, as we talk, we might ask Lewis to tell us more about this.
‘A Bigger and Better Cat’: Aslan and the Problem of Projection
Lewis might begin by telling us why he was an atheist as a younger man. One of the most important arguments for atheism was originally set out by the German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach in the 1840s and popularised in England in the later nineteenth century by the novelist George Eliot. For Feuerbach and Eliot, God was simply an invention. God was merely a projection of unfulfilled human longings, the invention of a restless and dissatisfied humanity. The most famous statement of this approach is that of the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, who declared that God was a ‘wish-fulfilment’. God was just a copy of a human father. In his late work The Future of an Illusion (1927), Freud argued that God was a projection of the father figure that everyone craved, a fulfilment of the ‘oldest, strongest, and most urgent wishes of mankind’.3
These views were widely and somewhat uncritically accepted in Western intellectual culture during the period between the two world wars. Indeed, their popularity was often taken as an indication of their truth. Christianity rested on an illusion that we create as a way of giving ourselves meaning and significance. God is nothing more than the projection of some kind of father figure onto an imaginary transcendent screen. Fathers are real enough – but God is simply an imagined father, whom we invent because we need security.
How could such an idea be countered? One way is to mount a logical attack on the approach. Suppose we do want God to exist. Why is that a reason for saying God can’t exist? After all, one way of reading the Christian doctrine of creation points to a ‘homing instinct’ for God being planted within the human mind and heart. And what if atheism is also a wish-fulfilment? Historians point out that atheism became a significant force in Western culture partly because it meant that if we no longer have to reference God in our moral reasoning, we can do what we like.
Now, these arguments are important, and can easily be developed to undermine the force of the idea that God is simply some kind of ‘projection’ of the human heart. But, like all arguments, they are not very exciting. They engage the reason, but not the imagination. So how would Lewis, with his deft ability to bring reason and imagination together, deal with this question? To find the answer, we turn to The Silver Chair, one of the most interesting of the Chronicles of Narnia. Why is it so interesting? Because it reworks a famous image used by the ancient Greek philosopher Plato – a dark underground cave.
Plato asks us to imagine a group of people trapped in a cave, knowing only a world of flickering shadows cast by a fire. Since they don’t have any experience of another world, they assume the shadows are the only reality. The cave is all there is. It defines the limits of reality. Yet we know – and are meant to know! – that there is another world beyond the cave, awaiting discovery.
When I first read this passage, I was an eighteen-year-old, hard-nosed rationalist who had yet to discover Christianity. I regarded Plato’s analogy as typical escapist superstition. What you see is what you get, I thought, and that’s the end of the matter. Yet a still, small voice within me whispered words of doubt. What if this world is only part of the story? What if this world is only a shadowland? What if there is something more wonderful beyond it? In The Silver Chair, Lewis uses Plato’s analogy to make the case for Christianity, using a powerful imaginative argument.
The plot of The Silver Chair is a bit like a Mission: Impossible film. Puddleglum (a mildly depressed Marshwiggle), Jill Pole and Eustace Scrubb are sent to rescue a Narnian prince from his captivity. The prince is being held against his will by the queen of the Underworld in a dark subterranean cavern. After some exciting adventures, the heroes arrive in the underground world, where they meet the prince, who is tied to a chair. They cut his bonds and set him free.
Just as they are about to leave, the queen arrives. She throws some green powder on the fire and begins to play some beguiling music. The ‘sweet and drowsy’ fragrance of the burning powder and the ‘steady, monotonous thrumming’ of the music enchants them. They begin to lose their memory of the ‘overworld’ – the real world – beyond the dark cavern. We see here Lewis’s brilliant evocation of cultural suppression of the deep human instinct that there is more to life than what we see around us. We need to break free from this ‘evil enchantment’. For Lewis, the key lies as much in our imagination as in our reason.
Having beguiled her visitors, the queen tries to persuade them that they are deluded. There is no overworld. Her kingdom is the only reality. They have simply invented the idea of the overworld. The Narnian prince protests. There really is an overworld! It’s not like this dark kingdom – it has a sun! The queen invites him to tell her more about this so-called ‘sun’. Looking around, the prince sees a lamp. The sun is just like that lamp, he declares:
You see that lamp. It is round and yellow and gives light to the whole room; and hangeth moreover from the roof. Now that thing which we call the sun is like the lamp, only far greater and brighter. It giveth light to the whole Overworld and hangeth in the sky.4
The queen laughs dismissively. There is no sun! The prince has simply invented the idea, based on the lamp. ‘Your sun is a dream; and there is nothing in that dream that was not copied from the lamp. The lamp is the real thing; the sun is but a tale, a children’s story.’ Anyway, what does the sun hang from? This stumps the prince.
Jill now enters the conversation. What about Aslan? He’s part of the real world outside the cave, isn’t he? The queen ridicules Jill’s intervention. Jill has merely invented this lion, just as the prince invented the sun. Aslan is simply a big imaginary cat, in the same way the sun is just an imaginary lamp. ‘You’ve seen cats, and now you want a bigger and better cat, and it’s to be called a lion.’ Everything in their ‘make-believe’ world, the queen confidently assures them, has simply been copied from ‘the real world, this world of mine, which is the only world’. They’re deluded. It’s time to face up to reality!
Finally, Puddleglum, Jill, Eustace and the Narnian prince are able to make their escape and get back to the real world – which they are reassured to find is not an illusion! Yet the important thing about this passage is not just the answer Lewis gives, but the way in which he gives it. Let’s focus on his approach and appreciate its wisdom.
Lewis rebuts the ‘projection’ theory by telling a story. The appeal of his approach lies primarily with the imagination, not with reason. We grasp Lewis’s point through our imaginations, and our reason struggles to keep up. In effect, Lewis’s narrative subverts Freud’s account of the origins of belief in God by showing that this seemingly sophisticated argument is actually rather shallow and superficial. How does he do this?
Lewis’s readers know there is a sun. They can easily imagine the scenario of an underground realm (especially if they’ve read Plato, from whom Lewis borrowed this image). And they can just as easily imagine someone who has been imprisoned within this world all his or her life, who thinks that the underground kingdom is the only reality! They smile with amusement when this person declares that anyone who thinks there is a world beyond the cave is deluded. Just who is deluded? we wonder. Knowing the reality, we can smile at the superficial plausibility of the illusion. Lewis’s appeal is to our imaginations. He helps us to see the weakness of this approach.
Lewis’s point is that Feuerbach and Freud have cast a spell over Western culture, aiming to convince us that they are right and we are wrong. They present their speculative theories as if they were self-evident truths: Only a fool would think there is a God! Lewis helps us see that, in the first place, their approach is only a theory, and in the second, it is not a particularly plausible theory. It’s only one way of looking at things – which is what the word theory really means – and there are other (and better) ways of seeing. Lewis’s story gives us another way of looking at this ‘projection’ theory, which makes us realise that it is far more vulnerable than we might otherwise have realised.
Yet there is another point here, too easily overlooked. The narrative of The Silver Chair initially calls into question the existence of the overworld – and then of Aslan himself. When this is interpreted in Christian terms (as Lewis surely wished), this is initially a challenge to the existence of heaven, and then of Christ. It is important to remember here that Lewis’s conversion to Christianity took place in two stages. In the first phase, Lewis came to believe in God, seeing this as linked with the existence of heaven, as a transcendent realm.5 Second, a little later he began to believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ. The order of analysis in The Silver Chair parallels Lewis’s own conversion story. Lewis initially defends the existence of a transcendent reality, and then the existence of Jesus Christ (here represented by Aslan).
We now need to look at Aslan more closely and explore how Lewis uses his most brilliant literary creation as a lens through which we can see Christ more clearly.
A Person, Not an Idea
The most characteristic feature of Lewis’s depiction of Aslan is that he is a figure who evokes awe and wonder. Lewis develops this theme by emphasising that Aslan is wild – an awe-inspiring, magnificent creature who has not been tamed through domestication, or had his claws pulled out to ensure he is powerless. As the Beaver whispered to the children, ‘He’s wild, you know. Not like a tame lion.’6
Lewis’s telling phrase is much more important than many realise. Aslan is not a ‘tame lion’. Throughout the Chronicles of Narnia, Aslan is portrayed as a magnificent living animal, who has a profound effect on those he meets. When Aslan’s name is mentioned for the first time, the four children feel ‘quite different’. Yet each experiences different reactions. Edmund feels ‘mysterious horror’, Peter feels ‘brave and adventurous’, Susan feels elated, and Lucy gets the feeling you have when you ‘realise it is the beginning of the holidays’.7
There is clearly something special about Aslan. Yet each of the children experiences this in his or her own way. Lewis’s narrative constantly emphasises that Aslan encounters and transforms people individually. It is impossible to miss Lewis’s allusions to the Gospel narratives about the encounters between Jesus Christ and individuals – such as his meetings with Zacchaeus and the woman at the well. They come away from those encounters as different people. Their world has been turned upside down by the stranger who seems to know everything about them.
Lewis was concerned about two trends that he discerned within the Christian churches of his day, each of which seemed to impoverish the majesty and mystery of Christ. First, there was the well-meaning preacher who tried to make Christ more accessible by using homely analogies – for example, ‘Jesus as our friend’. Yet this amiable analogy is all too easily misunderstood as ‘Jesus is just our friend’.
A major theme in Lewis’s philosophy of education is that we must expand our vision so that it is better able to take in reality, rather than limit reality to what we can cope with. Lewis makes this point repeatedly in the Chronicles of Narnia. Aslan overwhelms the children’s ability to understand him. They simply cannot take him in. No matter how hard they try, they are able to grasp only so much of his nature and purposes. Aslan is good, but he is not tame. They learn to respect and trust him, even though they know they do not fully understand him.
Lewis’s second concern was with theologians who reduced Jesus Christ to neat little doctrinal formulas. Lewis didn’t have problems with theological statements about Jesus Christ – for example, the traditional credal declaration that he is ‘true God’. What he was worried about was that these formulas might become substitutes for the living reality of Jesus Christ.
In the Chronicles of Narnia, Lewis set out the story of Aslan as a retelling of the ‘actual incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection’. The reader is invited to reflect on this story and draw conclusions about Aslan’s true identity and significance. Indeed, Lewis offers generous hints and guidance about what those conclusions might be throughout his narrative. But Lewis’s emphasis is on the story; the interpretation arises from the story and is secondary to it. This does not mean that the interpretation is unimportant. It is part of this overall picture – but only part of it. Lewis wants us to see that Aslan should be appreciated as a totality, not simply reduced to a mere theory. We see here Lewis’s characteristic appeal to both reason and imagination. He invites us to ‘see’ Aslan fully.
Lewis needs to be heard here. Much Christian thinking about Jesus Christ has been influenced by what scholars call the ‘Enlightenment project’ – a rationalist approach to faith and theology originating primarily in the eighteenth century. One leading theme of this rationalist culture of the eighteenth century was its attempt to master the world by reducing it to theory. Enlightenment rationalism encouraged the idea that reality be reduced to something that reason could master – in other words, theories. As a result, both God and Jesus Christ were often reduced to what human reason could manage. Both God and Christ came to be trapped within rationalist cages, like majestic tigers imprisoned and unable to show themselves for what they really were.
Lewis protests against this trend, not least in relation to the core realities of the Christian faith. Perhaps Lewis’s conversion experience, in which he realised that God was drawing close to him, encouraged him to reject impoverished ideas of God. For Lewis, theory was determined and limited by reality. For many modernists, however, reality was determined and limited by theory. One of Lewis’s most distinctive themes concerns the secondary nature of Christian doctrines. These, he argues, are ‘translations into our concepts and ideas of that [which] God has already expressed in a language more adequate’ – namely, the ‘grand narrative’ of the Christian faith itself.8
Thus Lewis argues that ‘the theories are not themselves the thing you are asked to accept’.9 Theories are only intermediaries for an encounter with reality, offering partial and reduced rather than total and comprehensive accounts of what they depict. These second-order levels of engagement with reality may be neat, crisp and admirably logical. Yet they fall short of what true Christianity is all about – an encounter with the living God, something that can never be accommodated without radical imaginative loss. A God who is reduced to what reason can cope with is not a God who can be worshipped.
So there’s a sense in which Lewis is telling us that there are limits to our understanding of Jesus Christ. It’s too easy to imprison Jesus Christ within a theological cage, taming him and mastering him. Lewis reminds us that Christ masters us, and that part of our discipleship of the mind is to expand our intellectual vision and range so that we can appreciate him more fully.
Yet the Christian life is about more than just sorting out our ideas. It’s about the way we live. Let’s ask Lewis to tell us about how the Narnia novels help us think about virtue.
Lewis on Virtue: How Do We Become Good People?
If the Chronicles of Narnia are read in the order of publication,10 the reader first encounters Aslan in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, which deals with the coming of salvation. The Magician’s Nephew deals with the great themes of creation and the fall, while The Last Battle concerns the ending of the old order and the dawn of a new creation. In every case, Aslan is of central importance, mirroring the roles of Jesus Christ as Creator, Redeemer and Judge.
The other four novels (Prince Caspian, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, The Horse and His Boy and The Silver Chair) reflect on the life of faith, which is framed in terms of the past and future comings of Aslan. As I mentioned previously, Aslan is at one and the same time an object of memory and of hope. The characters in the story must walk through the ‘shadowlands’, the difficult place between remembrance and hope, where they are assaulted by evil and by doubt. They must fix their gaze upon Aslan. And it is in this context that Lewis explores how Aslan shapes the life of faith.
Christianity is about the way we behave, not just the way we think. One of Lewis’s four series of broadcasts on the BBC during the Second World War dealt with the topic of ‘Christian behaviour’. Throughout his letters, Lewis shows himself as someone who wanted to do what was right and to learn from others who could help him.
Perhaps we ought not to be surprised that a major theme in the Chronicles of Narnia is how we become – and remain! – good people. Gilbert Meilander, one of America’s leading moral philosophers, pointed out how the Narnia novels are more than ‘good stories’. They help us to ‘build character’ by providing us with examples from which we can learn, rather like an apprentice working with a master.11
Lewis realised that it isn’t enough to tell people to be ‘good’. They need someone to show them what goodness looks like. A role model is worth a thousand words! It’s much better to tell a story which shows us how someone acted nobly than to read a textbook about the abstract idea of nobility.
The Chronicles of Narnia are packed full of stories. Some of them model good behaviour; some model bad. Yet we can learn from both. It is not simply a question of avoiding evil and embracing virtue. It is about recognising that we need to look hard at ourselves and realise that we have to face up to sometimes difficult and awkward truths. Seeking virtue is indeed noble. But there is some remedial work that we need to take care of before we begin the quest for virtue.
Self-knowledge has always been an important theme in Christian spirituality. It was important for Lewis as well. While writing my biography of Lewis, I frequently found myself concerned about his behaviour in the 1910s and 1920s. Lewis regularly lied to his father about his financial situation and his relationship with Mrs Moore, and felt no remorse about doing so. Deception seemed to come easily to Lewis, especially in his relationship with his father. Yet Lewis’s conversion in 1930 changed everything. He began to deal with his own darker side. He realised that he was self-obsessed, and stopped keeping a diary. Most significantly, Lewis came to regret his behaviour towards his father. He realised he had acted unforgivably.
Owen Barfield, one of Lewis’s closest friends, once remarked that the mature Lewis came to understand ‘self-knowledge’ as a ‘recognition of his own weaknesses and shortcomings’.12 Perhaps we should not be surprised that this is a major theme in the Chronicles of Narnia. For Lewis, one of Aslan’s chief roles is to enable people to discover the truth about themselves. Aslan is such a commanding figure that he helps people who might otherwise remain locked in self-deception break free from this prison. Somehow, Aslan makes it possible for people to confront the truth about themselves.
Let’s look at a familiar example to see what Lewis has in mind. In The Magician’s Nephew, things take a turn for the worse when someone wakes nasty Queen Jadis up from her enchanted sleep. (Realising that she was unable to exert her evil influence for the time being, she had cast a spell of enchanted sleep on herself, leaving a bell nearby so that she could be aroused when the right moment came.) But who would do such a stupid thing? Who would be mad enough to unleash her evil?
When questioned by Aslan, Digory reluctantly admits that he was the one who rang the bell. He offers some half-hearted defence of his action. But as Aslan stares at him, Digory breaks down and admits his failure. He abandons his pathetic attempt at self-justification and takes responsibility for his actions. The gaze of Aslan compels him to tell the truth – both to Aslan and to himself. It is as if Aslan offers a mirror in which we see ourselves as we really are. Or a light which reveals what we are really like, no matter how uncomfortable this may be.
Lewis is trying to help us realise that the quest for virtue involves both breaking the power of sin and embracing the power of good. Both, for Lewis, require the grace of God. It is no accident that Lewis portrays Aslan as someone who is inspirational. There is something about him that enables us to see and do things that otherwise would lie beyond our ability or inclination. A rich theology of divine grace nestles within the stories of Aslan’s encounters with people (such as Digory) and with the other inhabitants of Narnia.
Lewis here develops a theme often found in the long tradition of Christian spiritual writing, which holds that it is by contemplating Christ that we are enabled to identify and confront our sin and resolve to become better people. Yet this is not clumsily forced on the readers of the Chronicles of Narnia. There are points where the imagery is obvious to those in the know. For example, the deeply moving account of Susan and Lucy stroking the dead Aslan’s fur in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe evokes the medieval imagery of the Pietà – Michelangelo’s depiction of Mary holding the dead body of Jesus Christ, immediately following the crucifixion. Yet Lewis’s story makes the point effectively for all his readers, even if it is his Christian readers who will appreciate it to the full. We need help if we are to stop doing wrong and start being good.
So what of virtue? As a scholar of both the classics and medieval literature, Lewis knew the importance of the quest for the good life. It is a theme that recurs throughout both Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia and J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. Both show the need for people of character and virtue in a complex and confusing world. Good does not triumph unless good people rise to the challenges around them.
Both Lewis and Tolkien show how it is often the weak and lowly who are called upon to undertake great challenges. Tolkien brings this out in the critical role of the lowly hobbits in securing and destroying the malignant ring. Lewis shows us how the humble and lowly can achieve greatness in one of his most beloved characters – Reepicheep the mouse.
Reepicheep is a small mouse who realises that he has a great calling, even if he does not fully understand it. In Prince Caspian he is brave and courteous; in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader he develops a passion for achieving the task to which he has been called. His concern is not to win glory or fame for himself, but to fulfil his quest – to travel to the ‘Utter East’ and find ‘Aslan’s Country’.
Reepicheep is clearly modelled on a medieval knight – a noble and chivalrous ‘warrior mouse’,13 bringing together valour and purity. Lewis is trying to help us see that Reepicheep does not act bravely and nobly only every now and then. His point is that Reepicheep has become a brave and noble mouse, and that this shapes all his judgements and actions. Who Reepicheep is determines what Reepicheep does.
Lewis opens up the great question of how we pursue virtue in his own helpful way – not by giving us lectures on moral philosophy (though let’s remember that Lewis’s first lectures at Oxford were on this theme!), but by telling us stories in which we can see virtue in action. He shows us what virtue looks like and helps us understand how we become virtuous.
And whether directly or indirectly, Aslan lies at the heart of all these stories of virtue. He is their ultimate inspiration. He invites others to become part of his story. It is a privilege to become part of this story, and that privilege carries with it responsibilities. We are called on to work out what our roles should be and how we should behave appropriately. By giving us role models in the Chronicles of Narnia, Lewis allows us to grasp how even humble people can become noble and virtuous and make a difference in the greater scheme of things.
That’s why exploring Lewis’s literary creations in the Narnia series is so useful when seeking the answers to the meaning-of-life questions – whether a question is what the true nature of God is or how we become good people. Through the Narnia series, Lewis shows these truths to us instead of telling us about them. This approach made Lewis one of the most beloved Christian authors of the twentieth century.
Lewis would probably be pleased that this is the last time we’ll raise the topic of Narnia with him. His correspondence suggests that he found it a little tiring discussing its many themes with people, each of whom demanded his personal attention! In our next imagined meeting with Lewis, we’ll move on to discuss the discipline which he made his own – apologetics.