Friday
While researching the imagination chapter in my book, I’ve just come across a wonderful article by my Sewanee colleague John Gatta that links Aslan, Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, and the future of the planet. The article’s title is a mouthful—“Not a Tame Lion”: Animal Compassion and the Ecotheology of Imagination in Four Anglican Thinkers”—but I think you’ll like the central idea.
When Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner shoots the albatross, John says, he not only shows his “disdain for animal life in general but a denial of his own shared involvement in the integrity of creation.” The deed, John says, “amounts to a failure of imagination.”
To explain how this is the case, John explains Coleridge’s view of imagination. For him, it is
that vital faculty of mind by which we envision the wholeness of reality, the often unseen web of connections that unifies otherwise disparate elements of God’s creation…. It corresponds to what we might recognize today as an inherently ecological cast of mind.
This cast of mind is the realization that we are much more deeply enmeshed in nature than we may realize. There is no clear dividing line between “human” and “nature,” as becomes ever clearer to us as we see our excessive hydrocarbons triggering killer storms, blistering droughts, record-setting fires, unprecedented heat waves, and alarming sea-level rise. We respond to nature and nature responds to us in myriad ways, many of which we are only dimly aware.
The Mariner’s “death of imagination,” John says,
thus leaves him unable to perceive any creaturely kinship between himself and the animal he thoughtlessly destroys. He is blind to all he shares spiritually and even biologically (including, as we recognize today, a common preponderance of DNA coding) with the albatross.
The logical result of this separation is that he is “plunged into radical isolation and miserable exposure to death-in-life.” Separating oneself from nature is its own punishment, just as, in Dante’s Inferno, the souls punish themselves by cutting themselves off from divine love. They are, say, blown by the winds of ceaseless desire (the adulterous lovers Paulo and Francesca) or encased in permanent ice (those who betray their heart and their friends, like Judas). Whatever short thrill we get from dominating nature—from shooting the albatross—we pay for by finding ourselves lost in an alien and hostile environment. Furthermore, we deprive ourselves of the spiritual sustenance that nature provides.
Just as failure of the imagination leads us into this condition, however, exercising the imagination can restore us to health. The Mariner’s salvation lies in seeing the beauty of the water snakes, which previously he had regarded as “slimy, slimy things”:
Beyond the shadow of the ship,
I watched the water-snakes
They moved in tracks of shining white
And when they reared, the elvish light
Fell of in hoary flakes.
Within the shadow of the ship
I watched their rich attire:
Blue glossy green and velvet black
they coiled and swam, and every track
Was a flash of golden fire.
O happy living things! No tongue
Their beauty might declare:
A spring of love gushed from my heart,
And I blessed them unaware:
Sure my kind saint took pity on me,
and I blessed them unaware.
The Mariner’s tortuous journey ultimately brings him to the succinctly-stated revelation that he shares with the wedding guest at the end of the poem:
He prayeth best, who loveth best
All things both great and small;
for the dear God who loveth us,
He made and loveth all.
John mentions other instances where the imagination has allowed people to step beyond the narrow boundaries of self and seek a kinship with nature. William Wilberforce, best known for his anti-slavery work, also was actively involved in the promotion of animal welfare. According to John, he had many pets, denounced such practices as bull-baiting, and helped found the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.
All this is useful background for understanding the significance of Aslan. John notes Lewis’s emphasis on Aslan’s wildness, quoting Mr. Beaver (in Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe), “He’ll be coming and going….He’s wild, you know. Not like a tame lion” and “Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you.” On the issue of wildness, John cites Wendell Berry’s description of God as “the wildest being in existence.” He also cites the Book of Job, where God references nature and various powerful creatures (starting with whales) to show Job how much more to creation there is than human beings.
If, as John sees it, Lewis attributing “deific and Christological powers to a wild beast” is a “boldly original stroke,” it’s because it takes us out a human-centered version of creation to one encompassing all of nature. This vision is further accentuated by the creation scene in The Magician’s Nephew:
Aslan’s voice surpasses ordinary speech to become wild but beautiful song, as he joins in harmony with other voices to sing the land of Narnia into existence. The author’s poetically stirring account of this creation parallels the Job-author’s evocation of that primal era. “When the morning stars sang together and all the heavenly beings shouted for joy.”
To be sure, Aslan then anoints a son of Adam and a daughter of Eve as the rulers of this creation. Lewis still awards humans top billing once creation gets started. All the same, Aslan being a lion opens up new possibilities.
John concludes by asking why we think that God’s incarnation in the world has to necessarily be human. He even wonders how the Christian vision would handle the possibility of non-human life on other planets. Then he observes that Lewis starts to grapple with these very questions in his science fiction. While “Lewis the essayist and rational apologist might hesitate to speculate about such issues, Lewis the imaginative fiction writer was arguably more adventurous, a mental traveler disposed to visit lands as strange as Narnia if not stranger still.”
That last observation takes me back to a talk I heard by Rob MacSwain, editor of the Cambridge Companion to C. S. Lewis who teaches at Sewanee’s School of Theology. After saying that Anglicans/Episcopalians are not as theological as other denominations (say, Catholics and Lutherans), MacSwain immediately qualified his assertion by noting that they do theology in other ways. Instead of engaging in systematic thought, they use poetry and literature to explore metaphysical issues. MacSwain noted as examples John Donne, George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, Alfred Lord Tennyson, and of course C.S. Lewis. My friend’s article makes clear how even a children’s series can be part of that exploration.