Sunday
Last week I mentioned how versions of the Holy Spirit’s descent appear in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and Prince Caspian. Today I turn to C.S. Lewis’s handling of the Genesis creation story, which is often read on the first Sunday after Pentecost. I turn for assistance to The Green Worlds of C.S. Lewis: The Ecology of Aslan’s Realm, written and just released by my friend and colleague John Gatta.
I’ve previously written about Gatta’s The Transfiguration of Christ and Creation and Green Gospel: Foundations of Ecotheology. In both he challenges those who insist on human dominion over or even stewardship of nature because such framings separate humans from nature. Rather, animals, plants, and minerals are also involved in God’s unfolding creation. Such a vision, Gatta says, is to be found in The Magician’s Nephew, where Aslan sings Narnia into existence. I start with the well-known opening of Genesis:
In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light. And God saw that the light was good…
Through the use of magic rings Polly and Digory, along with several others, have been transported to a formless void of their own. Then Aslan appears:
In the darkness something was happening at last. A voice had begun to sing. It was very far away and Digory found it hard to decide from what direction it was coming. Sometimes it seemed to come from all directions at once. Sometimes he almost thought it was coming out of the earth beneath them. Its lower notes were deep enough to be the voice of the earth herself. There were no words. There was hardly even a tune. But it was, beyond comparison, the most beautiful noise he had ever heard. It was so beautiful he could hardly bear it.
With the singing, stars begin to shine in the heavens, followed by much more:
The lion was pacing to and fro about that empty land and singing his new song. It was softer and more lilting than the song by which he had called up the stars and the sun; a gentle, rippling music. And as he walked and sang the valley grew green with grass. It spread out from the Lion like a pool. It ran up the sides of the little hills like a wave. In a few minutes it was creeping up the lower slopes of the distant mountains, making that young world every moment softer. The light wind could now be heard ruffling the grass. Soon there were other things besides grass. The higher slopes grew dark with heather. Patches of rougher and more bristling green appeared in the valley. Digory did not know what they were until one began coming up quite close to him. It was a little, spiky thing that threw out dozens of arms and covered these arms with green and grew larger at the rate of about an inch every two seconds. There were dozens of these things all round him now. When they were nearly as tall as himself he saw what they were. “Trees!” he exclaimed.
And:
Can you imagine a stretch of grassy land bubbling like water in a pot? For that is really the best description of what was happening. In all directions it was swelling into humps. They were of very different sizes, some no bigger than mole-hills, some as big as wheelbarrows, two the size of cottages. And the humps moved and swelled till they burst, and the crumbled earth poured out of them, and from each hump there came out an animal…. The panthers, leopards and things of that sort, sat down at once to wash the loose earth off theirhind quarters and then stood up against the trees to sharpen their front claws. Showers of birds came out of the trees. Butterflies fluttered. Bees got to work on the flowers as if they hadn’t a second to lose….And now you could hardly hear the song of the Lion; there was so much cawing, cooing, crowing, braying, neighing, baying, barking, lowing, bleating, and trumpeting.
To Gatta, Aslan singing Narnia into existence is the most memorable feature of Magician’s Nephew, something “beautifully consonant with the way other imaginative writers–ranging from the authors of the Book of Job, Dante, and Shakespeare to J.R. R. Tolkien, T.S. Eliot, John Muir and Wendell Berry –have expounded upon the music of creation.”
In both Genesis and Magician’s Nephew, Gatta observes, creation stems “not from any intrinsic necessity, but in a spirit of pure, radically expansive love, exuberance, and joy.” Where the two stories diverge is that Aslan’s song “culminates in the birth not of our own human species, but of animals gifted with intelligible speech who will become the land’s central consciousness.”
This is important, Gatta says, because it moves us past the dominion/stewardship conversation. Although “humans from elsewhere” will play a role in Narnia’s future, the focus is initially on non-human creation. Gatta points out,
After Aslan as Singer sounds the keynote, other beings—including trees, stars, waters, horses, rabbits, moles, beavers, leopards, and sundry wild beasts–are drawn to join their voices in glorious harmony with that keynote, and with “the voice of the earth herself.” It’s a symphony that echoes the Book of Job and other biblical texts, wherein the morning stars join with countless other forms of being, both visible and invisible, to sing God’s hymn of ongoing creation.
By calling out, ‘“Narnia, Narnia, Narnia, awake. . . . Be walking trees. Be talking beasts. Be divine waters,” all created beings are “called to consent to their full emergence.” Nor is that all. The Creator expects them to take an active part in their own being and becoming, as well as “in promoting the health of their larger community of creation.” Gatta explains the significance of this:
The creatures Aslan addresses here have already come to birth but still need to awaken to a fuller, second stage of their creation. That participatory stage calls for them to respond to the gift of life with a sign of their acceptance. It is phrased in strikingly direct, penetrating language.
“Creatures, I give you yourselves. . . . and I give you myself.”
Accentuating his point, Gatta says that Aslan is expecting his creatures “to develop an involvement and responsibility in their own creation, conceived as an ongoing process.” By the declaration, “I give you myself,” the creator lion “confirms his own sustained engagement in the process.” He further confirms it by touching noses with each of the animals.
God, in short, has “a personal, intimate investment in the process of Creation.”
Unfortunately sin has also entered Narnia in the form of Uncle Andrew, who dreams of monetizing the new world, and Queen Jadis, who wants to assert dominion over it (and ultimately will do so as the White Witch). They are incapable of hearing the voice of the Lion. As Aslan says of Andrew, “If I spoke to him, he would hear only growlings and roarings,” before adding, “Oh Adam’s sons, how cleverly you defend yourselves against all that might do you good!”
For those humans who harken to the Lion’s song, however, a vision of heaven on earth opens. “Gawd!” says the cabdriver. “Ain’t it lovely?”
“Whoever has ears,” Jesus said, “let them hear.”
To sum up Gatta’s argument, Magician’s Nephew shows a divine Creator who is integrally involved in “the continuous creation of things” and a Creation that is called upon to play an active role in the process. Rather than thinking of God as one who has set up Creation and then ducked out, only to return disgusted when humans messed things up, Gatta says we should see God as an on-going, ever-changing, and never-ending journey. The question is whether we will get on board.
