Of course, you don’t need to understand the religious symbolism of this work to fall under the sway of its quasi-medieval splendor - and I suspect that a significant proportion of its fans have read it without probing deeply, or at all, into its theology. I read the entire series aloud to my sons, and did not explain any of the Christian symbolism to them at the time. Yet their lack of insight into Lewis’s personal values did not limit their fascination with the tales of Narnia. They could feel a larger-than-life significance in Aslan, without having to assign it to a specific religious denomination.
I prefer to follow Lewis’s own lead, as demonstrated in another of his books — the much under-rated The Abolition of Man — and point out that the most important values are those that tend to cut across the standard party lines, whether philosophical, ideological or denominational. The Chronicles of Narnia is much the same. You cannot reduce this work to a catechism any more than you need to believe in Zeus and Athena in order to appreciate Homer. Lewis’s work has enjoyed its well-deserved popularity because it is built on an acute psychological understanding of human nature, not dogma.
What about Aslan? Is he simply a sugar-coated Christ, and Lewis no different than the proselytizers who leave pamphlets at your door? In point of fact, we have known at least since Sir James Frazer published The Golden Bough that the concept of the dying and resurrected deity predates Christianity. It is a timeless story, eternally linked with the natural realities of death and regeneration. Elements of it exist in almost every culture. As I point out in my own book Healing Songs, the Greek story of Orpheus bringing his wife Eurydice back from the dead is echoed in similar stories found in over fifty Native American tribes. Did Greek mythology travel to pre-Columbian America? Hardly. The appeal of the rising-from-the-dead story is trans-cultural, respecting no dividing line between nations, races, creeds.
Children’s adventure books always have heroes and villains, and Lewis’s series is no different in this regard. Yet despite what you may have heard about these books, they are especially nuanced in looking at that murky area between self-righteousness and villainy. Characters in this work are constantly confronting hard choices, and sometimes making bad decisions. Even better, they find ways of recovering from the wrong choices of the past - a matter of great interest to youngsters, but rarely dealt with in children’s literature. Forgiving others - and forgiving yourself; finding ways not to right past mistakes (sometimes they can’t be made right) but recovering from them nonetheless; learning from painful experience... these are matters that Lewis handles masterfully. And not by talking about them in a pedagogical way. As with the allegorists that Lewis wrote about with such discernment, this novelist always weaves the deepest interior issues into a vivid external landscape, populated by characters who grapple mano-a-mano with the obstacles at hand.
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