Written by my friend Jokim Schnoebbe. He is an expert on C.S. Lewis and Narnia.You can find more info about him on his blog.
The new Narnia movie, Prince Caspian, is coming out this week and is sure to attract new readers to C. S. Lewis’ books. This is a fitting opportunity to address one of the confusions that exist about the literary type of the Chronicles of Narnia.
Time and again, it is referred to as a “Christi an allegory
,” a tag with which C. S. Lewis would not have been happy. As he explains in some of his essays and letters, an allegory is a work in which immaterial realities are represented by imaginary physical objects. For example, the immaterial faculty of Reason may be allegorically represented by someone we call Lady Reason. This Lady—because Reason is clear, undefiled, swift, cold, hard, and sharp like a sword—we could picture as a “sun-bright virgin clad in complete steel,” riding on a horse “with a sword naked in her hand.” This, C. S. Lewis has actually done in his only allegorical work, The Pigrim’s Regress, from which the example of Lady Reason is taken.
Is Narnia, then, an allegory? After all, C. S. Lewis loved allegorical literature, and it is obvious that elements of his Christianity flowed into the Narnian storyline, such as the concepts of Incarnation and Redemption.
Were C. S. Lewis alive, I think he would be very glad if readers were told about his view that the books are not an allegory. C. S. Lewis did not say to himself, “Let us represent Jesus as He really is in our world by a Lion in Narnia.” His original inspiration was much less theological than that—nothing more than a mental picture. Long before he became a Christian, he had a picture in his head of a faun carrying an umbrella and parcels in a snowy wood. Decades went past, until one day he said to himself, “Let’s try to make a story about it.” At first he had very little idea how the story would go. “But then suddenly,” he later wrote, “Aslan came bounding into it,” and “once he was there he pulled the whole story together, and soon he pulled the six other Narnian stories in after him.”
Read More
Hook up with me