By Robert H. Bell

C. S. Lewis (1898-1963), always multi-faceted and versatile, continues to elude definitions and provoke controversy. A major polemicist and great proselytizer, Lewis was regarded by millions as a modern Christian knight. He wrote The Chronicles of Narnia, a remarkable children’s series often described as Christian allegory. He also produced seminal works of literary criticism on medieval and Renaissance subjects, enduring science fiction novels, one of the world’s great spiritual autobiographies, Surprised by Joy, and many works beyond category, most notably The Screwtape Letters. Lewis has fair claim to be one of the most important writers in English in the first half of the twentieth century, the modern era he loathed in so many ways.

Born and raised in Belfast, Ireland by middle class, Anglican parents, Lewis was “a visionary boy,” creating whole worlds of talking animals. Lovers of Narnia will see its origins in Animal-Land or Boxen, the fantastic, and astonishingly detailed world invented, populated, and chronicled by Lewis and his beloved older brother. Losing his mother when he was nine, he endured English public schools, survived World War I, won a scholarship to Oxford, became a don and friend of J. R. R. Tolkein, and began publishing beyond the academy when he was forty. In his forties and fifties, he was an extremely popular writer as well as a renowned scholar and critic. He died the same day as President Kennedy.

Lovers of The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe eagerly and anxiously wonder how the film will render the book’s core spiritual pattern and significant Christian elements. Edmund, Son of Adam, disbelieves his sister’s account of Narnia, succumbs to the temptation of the White Witch, and betrays his siblings. Aslan the Lion, whose very name fills the children with “that strange feeling—like the first signs of spring, like good news,” sacrifices himself to save Edmund. Bound, shaven, mocked, Aslan is killed, mourned, and miraculously restored to life, “great and terrible at the same time.” He storms the castle and revivifies innocent creatures literally petrified by the Witch. Summarized thus, it is a story of fall and redemption. Martyred and resurrected, Aslan is unmistakably a Christ-figure whose sacrifice resonates throughout the seven volumes of Narnia.

For many readers, Lewis’s Christian doctrine is the heart and soul of the narrative, and not to recognize the spiritual imperative is naïve, or worse. It is said that when a pickpocket looks at a saint, he sees a pocket. To religious readers The Chronicles of Narnia are adroit instruction, like “Pre-Calculus,” preparing children for the real thing. At many junctures throughout the seven volumes of Narnia didactic lessons are certainly prominent. In The Voyage of the ‘Dawn Treader’ , for example, Aslan tells Lucy and Edmund: “This was the very reason you were brought to Narnia, that by knowing me here for a little, you may know me better there,” back home in England.

It also seems evident that Christian doctrine becomes progressively central in the series. By volume seven, The Last Battle, even the most stubborn skeptic would perceive the drama of apocalypse and redemption. Lewis makes emphatic the implicit spiritual pattern and the finality of closure: “And for us, this is the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived, happily ever after. But for them, it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page.”

In an essay titled, “Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What’s To Be Said,” Lewis characterizes his Narnian project as a stealth campaign, to “steal past watchful dragons” (he means skeptics, atheists, modernists) to depict the “real potency” of Christianity; in this formulation, the tale is told to deliver the gospel. On another occasion he said that, “The whole Narnian story is about Christ,” and even provided an abstract or synopsis of the chronicles from Genesis to Apocalypse: The Magician’s Nephew depicts “the Creation and how evil entered Narnia”; Prince Caspian recounts the “restoration of the true religion after a corruption”; The Horse and His Boy dramatizes “the calling and conversion of the heathen”; etc.

Despite its richly spiritual pattern and iconographic components, The Chronicles of Narnia are neither consistently allegorical nor primarily didactic. I contend in particular that The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe can very well be read without persistently allegorical interpretation. Until the resurrection of Aslan, The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe could have been written by E. Nesbitt. Children (I can testify, on behalf of Kaitlin, Amanda, Cyndie, and Pauline) regard the return of Aslan as “good magic,” wonderful, but not more sacred than the strange encounters, fantastic spectacles, and mysterious events in Alice in Wonderland, Five Children and It, or The Borrowers. There is the grown-up world of dentists and broccoli and bedtime, and there, just through the wardrobe and past the streetlamp, is Narnia. It is telling that Lucy, Edmund, Peter, and Susan are not faintly religious, before or after Aslan’s miraculous return: no evening prayers, no Bible-reading, no urgent prayers even in parlous straits. The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe is not a systematic allegory teaching Christian doctrine.

Usually in Narnia, and certainly throughout The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe, the narrative thrills without proselytizing its young readers. Kids are carried away by the excitement of being transported by a giant or a flying lion: Narnia is a land, above all, of mystery and wonder. One glorious sequence signaling the coming of Aslan, the sudden melting of winter and budding of spring, depicts an event at once amazing and familiar.

Allegory, properly speaking, manifestly and continuously represents a separate body of thought or sequence of events, for the primary (though not exclusive) purpose of highlighting or inculcating a doctrine or system of belief. An abstract idea or conception organizes and determines the narrative. Examples in English literature include Everyman, The Faerie Queen, and Pilgrim’s Progress. In John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, the wayfaring hero named Christian navigates Vanity Fair and the Slough of Despond, and other dangers, to reach Celestial City. Bunyan’s narrative, sacrificing individuation, motivation and verisimilitude, only makes sense as an allegorical representation of human travail through this world to the next. In 1933 Lewis wrote The Pilgrim’s Regress: An Allegorical Apology for Christianity, Reason, and Romanticism, and his first book of literary criticism was The Allegory of Love.

Lewis knew all about allegory—in effect, wrote the book. In The Chronicles of Narnia, though, he created something both like and unlike allegory: a marvelous narrative with metaphoric implications and mythic resonance. Christian Doctrine is one of several resources from which Lewis draws: beside Aslan are Father Christmas, Tumnus the faun, and talking beavers. Never in Narnia are there authorial winks or nudges, underscoring the “real” or hidden meaning. Lewis’s preaching is of another order, and sometimes amusing: three times he reminds young readers that it is very foolish to shut the door behind oneself in a wardrobe!

The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe does not prescribe doctrine and faith. Unlike Bunyan’s allegorical types (characters named Pliable or Hopeful), the four children are differentiated and motivated. Lewis’s various protagonists in Narnia, not just the children but the gallant mouse Reepicheep, the perpetual pessimist Puddleglum, and many more, live, vitally, independently, not to illustrate something higher or deeper. The Narnia Chronicles, like The Lord of the Rings, sustain and succor readers without delivering didactic meaning. Possibilities for interpretation remain open.

The critical and interpretive possibilities are multiple and complex enough to be vigorously debated in a new volume of essays by twenty-five critics, Revisiting Narnia: Fantasy, Myth and Religion in C. S. Lewis’ Chronicles (BenBella Books, 2005). These writers, including authors of fantasy fiction, scholars from different disciplines, ministers and priests, a “liberal feminist agnostic,” and an animal rights’ advocate, disagree widely—and blessedly. There is no consensus on how purposefully, pervasively, systematically, and effectively The Chronicles of Narnia “plant the seeds of Christian faith” or are a “vehicle for Lewis’ lessons of Christianity.” Whatever assumptions one brings to or meanings one derives from The Chronicle of Narnia are bound to be unsettled by competing arguments and contrary evidence. Narnia remains highly contested territory.

Lewis himself seemed to have been of contrary minds about his intentions. The truth is that his designs, as well as their effects, are mixed and various. He wrote very quickly, neglecting inconsistencies that troubled his friend Tolkein, a more meticulous craftsman. The Chronicles of Narnia has the defects of its virtues and vice versa. Its astonishing fecundity and inventiveness are sometimes contradictory. The time scheme, and the relation between Narnian and Greenwich Mean Time, are incoherent if not random. More significantly, the rules of the game seem to shift.

The ability and willingness of Aslan to intervene, for example, and the nature of human agency, are variable. In Prince Caspian, Lucy implores Aslan, “And I thought you’d come roaring in and frighten all the enemies away—like last time. And now everything is going to be horrid.” Aslan’s response is tender but confusing: “It is hard for you, little one. But things never happen the same way twice.” Some of the volumes are quests, more like myth and legend than theology or scripture. In The Voyage of the Dawn Treader and The Silver Chair, the adventures of the heroes and heroines are more contingent than providential, less dependent upon Aslan’s miraculous interventions. In other sagas, such as The Horse and His Boy, Aslan is ubiquitous; often in other shapes or forms, he determines much of the action and inculcates very particular lessons.

As we are reminded several times, Aslan is not a tame lion! One thing he will not do is stand still and mean one thing. Hence Aslan is a figure for but not an allegorical representation of Christ. To Lewis this was a distinction worth making, if not always maintaining: “The Passion and Resurrection of Aslan,” he wrote in a letter in 1960, “are the Passion and Resurrection Christ might be supposed to have had in that world—like those in our world but not exactly alike.”

If at other times, as I’ve indicated, Lewis insisted almost the opposite, on this point Lewis was relatively reliable. (Though we always have good reason to remember D. H. Lawrence’s remark, “Never trust the teller. Trust the tale.”) Writing to a fifth grade class, Lewis stressed his broader artistic purpose: “I did not say to myself, ‘Let us represent Jesus as He really is in our world by a Lion in Narnia.’ I said “Let us suppose that there was a land like Narnia and that the Son of God, as he became a Man in our world, became a Lion there, and then imagine what would happen’” (my emphasis).

If Narnia or Aslan stand for anything, it is the capacity to “suppose,” to imagine what would happen, not necessarily to affirm the everlasting grace of the redeemer or the infinite mercy of the Lord. The story has potent energies and some unruly tendencies, independent of any system or doctrine. Like any great work of art, The Chronicles of Narnia provoke and reward multiple interpretations, competing possibilities. One possibility it encourages us to believe, if we are receptive to the power of language, is the majestic capacity of imagination to envision and dramatize. In this power one might truly have faith. Then the rewards are indeed miraculous, for “Once a King or Queen in Narnia, always a King or Queen in Narnia.”

Robert H. Bell, Kenan Professor of English at Williams College, is the 2004 Carnegie Foundation/CASE “Professor of the Year.” A long-time contributor to Commonweal, his most recent book, co-authored with William C. Dowling, is A Reader’s Companion to Infinite Jest.