Sunday
My church reading group has devoted five sessions to John Gatta’s Green Worlds of C. S. Lewis: The Ecology of Aslan’s Realm. This is giving me an excuse to revisit the Narnia books.
John and I both ascribe to an idea propounded by Rob MacSwain, editor of The Cambridge Companion to C.S. Lewis and faculty member at Sewanee’s School of Theology, that Anglicans/Episcopalians practice theology by means of literature rather than analytic logic. Our theologians, one might say, are not St. Thomas Aquinas and Anselm but John Donne, George Herbert, William Blake, Wendell Berry, Mary Oliver, and Lewis.
A theological issue that came up in last week’s discussion is whether Aslan’s giving up his life for Edward in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe is atonement through penal substitution or through moral influence.
I’m no theologian and so don’t understand all the ins and out of the issue, but here’s how I understand the two interpretations of the crucifixion. In the penal theory, Christ died on the cross in order to cleanse humans of their sins. It’s as though humankind deserved punishment but Jesus took the punishment on himself to spare us, functioning as a kind of scapegoat or sacrificial lamb. This view of the crucifixion is powerfully articulated by Milton’s God in Paradise Lost, who is telling the angels around him what Adam and Eve will deserve once they eat the apple:
But to destruction sacred and devote,
[Man] with his whole posterity must die,
Die he or Justice must; unless for him
Some other able, and as willing, pay
The rigid satisfaction, death for death.
No one among the angels steps forth—”all the Heav’nly Quoir stood mute”—and humankind’s fate hangs in the balance:
[O]n man’s behalf
Patron or intercessor none appeared,
Much less that durst upon his own head draw
The deadly forfeiture, and ransom set.
And now without redemption all mankind
Must have been lost, adjudged to Death and Hell
By doom severe…
Fortunately, Jesus is there to save the day and volunteers for the mission.
I turn to Theopedia to sum up the moral influence theory:
This theory denies that Christ died to satisfy any principle of divine justice but teaches instead that His death was designed to greatly impress mankind with a sense of God’s love, resulting in softening their hearts and leading them to repentance. Thus, the Atonement is not directed towards God with the purpose of maintaining His justice, but towards man with the purpose of persuading him to right action.
Generally speaking, conservative fundamentalists lean towards the penal substitution theory whereas liberal Christians like myself prefer the moral influence theory.
So which vision seems to be guiding Lewis in his depiction of Aslan? At first glance, penal substitution appears to be at work. Although Edward is saved before the White Witch can cut his throat, she nevertheless claims that, as one who was prepared to betray his siblings, he belongs to her. In her conversation with Aslan she points out her rights:
“Have you forgotten the Deep Magic?” asked the Witch.
“Let us say I have forgotten it,” answered Aslan gravely. “Tell us of this Deep Magic.”
“Tell you?” said the Witch, her voice growing suddenly shriller. “Tell you what is written on that very Table of Stone which stands beside us? Tell you what is written in letters deep as a spear is long on the trunk of the World Ash Tree? Tell you what is engraved on the scepter of the Emperor-Beyond-the-Sea? You at least know the magic which the Emperor put into Narnia at the very beginning. You know that every traitor belongs to me as my lawful prey and that for every treachery I have a right to a kill.”
Unless she has blood, the Witch proclaims, “the Law says all Narnia will be overturned and perish in fire and water.” Or as Milton’s God puts it, “Die he or Justice must.”
The story unfolds very much along the lines of the crucifixion as described in the Gospels, complete with Susan and Lucy functioning as Mary Magdalene outside the tomb. After his resurrection, Aslan explains what has happened:
“Oh, you’re real, you’re real! Oh, Aslan!” cried Lucy and both girls flung themselves upon him and covered him with kisses.
“But what does it all mean?” asked Susan when they were somewhat calmer.
“It means,” said Aslan, “that though the Witch knew the Deep Magic, there is a magic deeper still which she did not know. Her knowledge goes back only to the dawn of Time. But if she could have looked a little further back, into the stillness and the darkness before Time dawned, she would have read there a different incantation. She would have known that when a willing victim who had committed no treachery was killed in a traitor’s stead, the Table would crack and Death itself would start working backwards.
This still sounds points toward penal substitution, as does a discussion that Lucy and Susan have following the battle:
“Does [Edmund] know,” whispered Lucy to Susan, “what Aslan did for him? Does he know what the arrangement with the Witch really was?”
“Hush! No. Of course not,” said Susan.
“Oughtn’t he to be told?” said Lucy.
“Oh, surely not,” said Susan. “It would be too awful for him. Think how you’d feel if you were he.”
“All the same I think he ought to know,” said Lucy. But at that moment they were interrupted.
In Susan’s eyes, Edmund would feel intolerably guilty if he knew that someone else had given up his life for him. And it’s worth noting that sin plays a key role in many of Lewis’s novels, including Digory striking the bell in Magician’s Nephew; Susan not believing Lucy in Prince Caspian; Aravis not caring that her serving maid is whipped in The Horse and His Boy (Aslan makes her pay by clawing her back); Jill forgetting the signs in The Silver Chair; and Tirian and Jewel killing two Calormenes in Last Battle. Oh, and Susan forfeits her place in Narnia heaven by becoming more interested in cosmetics.
Lucy, on the other hand, leans more toward a moral influence interpretation of Aslan’s sacrifice, which shifts the focus from guilt to love. Of course Edmund should be told because he would see in action Jesus’s declaration, “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13).
Perhaps Edmund has already intuited this. In the battle against the Witch’s forces, he puts his own life on the line for the forces of good. It’s as though, by ritually enacting the greater love, he has changed Edward’s heart and mind. When Lucy sees her brother—this after she has cured his substantial wounds—he is
looking better than she had seen him look—oh, for ages; in fact ever since his first term at that horrid school which was where he had begun to go wrong. He had become his real old self again and could look you in the face.
After he is crowned along with his siblings, we learn that he will become known as King Edmund the Just, “a graver and quieter man than Peter, and great in council and judgement.” In Prince Caspian, furthermore, he will again prove pivotal, persuading the others to follow Lucy when she sees Aslan, even though he and the others can’t.
I think the book goes beyond Edmund’s sin and the discussion of deep magic, emphasizing far more a vision of love. Jesus may tell Mary Magdalene, “Noli me tangere,” but in Lewis’s version of the resurrection, Aslan wants to be touched. He is in love with life and humanity in all their physicality, which results in the most exuberant passage in the Narnia Chronicles:
“Oh, children,” said the Lion, “I feel my strength coming back to me. Oh, children, catch me if you can!” He stood for a second, his eyes very bright, his limbs quivering, lashing himself with his tail. Then he made a leap high over their heads and landed on the other side of the Table. Laughing, though she didn’t know why, Lucy scrambled over it to reach him. Aslan leaped again. A mad chase began. Round and round the hill-top he led them, now hopelessly out of their reach, now letting them almost catch his tail, now diving between them, now tossing them in the air with his huge and beautifully velveted paws and catching them again, and now stopping unexpectedly so that all three of them rolled over together in a happy laughing heap of fur and arms and legs. It was such a romp as no one has ever had except in Narnia; and whether it was more like playing with a thunderstorm or playing with a kitten Lucy could never make up her mind. And the funny thing was that when all three finally lay together panting in the sun the girls no longer felt in the least tired or hungry or thirsty.
Aren’t we seeing heaven on earth in this moment?
Where Lewis’s Narnia books go beyond conventional theology is in their embrace of nature and God’s creation generally. This is the major point of John Gatta’s book, and one sees it in Lewis’s generous inclusion of figures from other cultures, myths, and religions (including Islam). It’s as though Christian symbolism alone, powerful though it may be, is not enough to express all that Lewis feels and sees. Through fantasy he could expand the playing field, although he unnerved Tolkien in the process. Santa Claus in Narnia?!
It’s not unlike what we see in the medieval romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Christian Camelot is all very well, but if you don’t include the Green Man in your vision of the world (and carved into the pillars of your local church), something crucial is missing.
It’s worth noting that George MacDonald, Lewis’s great mentor, also broke from a narrow Calvinism. Indeed, his Congregationalist church cut his salary when he started preaching about God’s universal love and insisting that everyone is capable of redemption. About MacDonald Lewis at one point wrote,
I know hardly any other writer who seems to be closer, or more continually close, to the Spirit of Christ Himself. Hence his Christ-like union of tenderness and severity. Nowhere else outside the New Testament have I found terror and comfort so intertwined.
One sees this union in Aslan, who can be severe upon occasion but who is always tender. I think of the scene in The Magician’s Nephew when Digory tells the lion about his sick mother:
“But please, please—won’t you—can’t you give me something that will cure Mother?” Up till then he had been looking at the Lion’s great front feet and the huge claws on them; now, in his despair, he looked up at its face. What he saw surprised him as much as anything in his whole life. For the tawny face was bent down near his own and (wonder of wonders) great shining tears stood in the Lion’s eyes. They were such big, bright tears compared with Digory’s own that for a moment he felt as if the Lion must really be sorrier about his Mother than he was himself.
“There is no place where earth’s sorrows are more felt than up in heaven,” goes one of my favorite Victorian hymns.
I conclude with an interchange—this when the White Witch is negotiating with Aslan—between her and Mr. Beaver. When she is insisting that, according to the Deep Magic installed by Emperor-Beyond-the-Sea, Edmund is her lawful prey, Mr. Beaver says,
“So that’s how you came to imagine yourself a Queen—because you were the Emperor’s hangman. I see.
Not a few Christians set themselves up as God’s hangmen, relishing the thought of passing judgment on sinners. Aslan, however, is never about punishment. His love for his creation is always paramount.
