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Sunday
“Narnia on the Mountain” is the theme of our Vacation Bible School this year. For old fuddy-duddies like me, the high point will be the adult lectures: former Sewanee Dean of the College Brown Patterson will recount studying with Lewis, my wife Julia is interested in Lewis’s relationship with Joy Davidman (she sees them as a power couple), and retired Sewanee English professor John Gatta will explore how Lewis became a leading Christian apologist. For the kids, however, we have a far different program.
A refrigerator box will be turned into a magical wardrobe, Mr. Tumnus will host a tea party, Father Christmas will pay a visit (complete with sleighbells), the Wicked Witch will hand out Turkish delight, and a game of freeze tag will include stone animal statues (donated lawn ornaments).
As we celebrate Pentecost this weekend, I combed through The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe to see if I could find any allusions to the Holy Spirit descending in tongues of flame. To my delight, I discovered the Lewis does indeed capture the joy of the Pentecostal moment.
For a reminder, here’s Luke’s account of the event:
When the day of Pentecost had come, the disciples were all together in one place. And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.
In the novel, of course, there’s a blood sacrifice as the White Witch slays Aslan, who has voluntarily surrendered himself to atone for Edmund’s guilt. Lucy and Susan, standing in for Mary Magdalene, are rewarded for their vigil with a direct encounter with the risen lion the following morning. Aslan’s breath assures them that he is indeed alive:
“You’re not—not a—?” asked Susan in a shaky voice. She couldn’t bring herself to say the word ghost.
Aslan stooped his golden head and licked her forehead. The warmth of his breath and a rich sort of smell that seemed to hang about his hair came all over her.
The Pentecostal moment comes a little later when the girls accompany Aslan to the White Witch’s castle and watch as he frees the animals that she has turned to stone. The Witch’s realm of ice is Lewis’s wasteland vision, a bleak midwinter in which (to draw from Christine Rossetti) frosty winds make moan while Earth stands “hard as iron, water like a stone.” Or as Mr. Beaver puts it, “Always winter and never Christmas.” The castle is bereft of life, as Edmund discovers upon his initial visit:
As he got into the middle of [the courtyard] he saw that there were dozens of statues all about—standing here and there rather as the pieces stand on a chess board when it is halfway through the game. There were stone satyrs, and stone wolves, and bears and foxes and cat-a-mountains of stone. There were lovely stone shapes that looked like women but who were really the spirits of trees. There was the great shape of a centaur and a winged horse and a long lithe creature that Edmund took to be a dragon. They all looked so strange standing there perfectly lifelike and also perfectly still, in the bright cold moonlight, that it was eerie work crossing the courtyard.
Aslan’s holy breath (to borrow from T.S. Eliot’s Waste Land) breeds life out of this dead land:
[Aslan] bounded up to the stone lion and breathed on him. Then without waiting a moment he whisked round—almost as if he had been a cat chasing its tail—and breathed also on the stone dwarf, which (as you remember) was standing a few feet from the lion with his back to it. Then he pounced on a tall stone Dryad which stood beyond the dwarf, turned rapidly aside to deal with a stone rabbit on his right, and rushed on to two centaurs.
What follows is Lewis’s version of the Pentecostal flames:
I expect you’ve seen someone put a lighted match to a bit of newspaper which is propped up in a grate against an unlit fire. And for a second nothing seems to have happened; and then you notice a tiny streak of flame creeping along the edge of the newspaper. It was like that now. For a second after Aslan had breathed upon him the stone lion looked just the same. Then a tiny streak of gold began to run along his white marble back—then it spread—then the color seemed to lick all over him as the flame licks all over a bit of paper—then, while his hindquarters were still obviously stone the lion shook his mane and all the heavy, stony folds rippled into living hair. Then he opened a great red mouth, warm and living, and gave a prodigious yawn. And now his hind legs had come to life. He lifted one of them and scratched himself.
In Luke’s account of the first Pentecost, skeptical witnesses sneer as the disciples begin to speak in tongues, claiming, “They are filled with new wine.” Lucy and Susan, however, are filled with genuine wonder at the magical moment that unfolds before them:
Of course the children’s eyes turned to follow the lion; but the sight they saw was so wonderful that they soon forgot about him. Everywhere the statues were coming to life. The courtyard looked no longer like a museum; it looked more like a zoo. Creatures were running after Aslan and dancing round him till he was almost hidden in the crowd. Instead of all that deadly white the courtyard was now a blaze of colors; glossy chestnut sides of centaurs, indigo horns of unicorns, dazzling plumage of birds, ruddy-brown of foxes, dogs, and satyrs, yellow stockings and crimson hoods of dwarfs; and the birch-girls in silver, and the beech-girls in fresh, transparent green, and the larch-girls in green so bright that it was almost yellow.
As far as speaking in tongues, a cacophony of languages characterizes both Pentecosts. Here’s the one described by Luke:
Now there were devout Jews from every nation under heaven living in Jerusalem. And at this sound the crowd gathered and was bewildered, because each one heard them speaking in the native language of each. Amazed and astonished, they asked, “Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? And how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language? Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabs– in our own languages we hear them speaking about God’s deeds of power.”
And now for Lewis’s account:
And instead of the deadly silence the whole place rang with the sound of happy roarings, brayings, yelpings, barkings, squealings, cooings, neighings, stampings, shouts, hurrahs, songs and laughter.
Mr. Beaver, early in the novel, channels the prophet Isaiah as he predicts this moment:
Wrong will be right, when Aslan comes in sight,
At the sound of his roar, sorrows will be no more,
When he bares his teeth, winter meets its death
And when he shakes his mane, we shall have spring again.
With the defeat of the White Witch, Aslan’s kingdom has come, on earth as it is in heaven. Hallelujah!
Note: In The Magician’s Book: A Skeptic’s Adventures in Narnia, journalist Laura Miller talks about becoming disillusioned when she discovered that her beloved Narnia can be read as a Christian allegory. She hated that Lewis might be secretly attempting to convert her. But she came to realize that Lewis, while certainly shaped by his Christian beliefs, is not preaching but rather capturing the excitement he finds in the resurrection story. And besides, he is no doctrinaire Christian as he sprinkles his Narnia books liberally with figures from pagan mythology (including wood nymphs, winged horses, centaurs, and satyrs). He’s in love with what Yeats called “the circus animals” of fantasy.
