Just how Christian are "The Chronicles of Narnia"? The question might seem absurd; the books' author, after all, was a famous Christian apologist who intended them to teach a form of the gospels. But one critic, at least, has challenged the legitimacy of Lewis' claim (voiced by the lion god Aslan, Lewis' Jesus surrogate) that "you were brought to Narnia, that by knowing me here for a little, you may better know me there." John Goldthwaite, a Christian himself and a scholar of children's literature, wrote an extended critique of the purported Christian underpinnings of the "Chronicles" in his intelligent, fiery and occasionally injudicious 1996 study of the field, "A Natural History of Make-Believe."

In essence, Goldthwaite argues that Lewis uses Narnia as a sheltered preserve for his own prejudices -- which, it must be admitted, were many and far from pretty. But closer to the heart of this critique lies Goldthwaite's assertion that "whenever a professed Christian feels he must create some wholly other world to explore the meaning of his religion, he is flirting with bad faith. When he fills that world with the make-believes of other religions, he is playing at polytheism. When he further sets sorceresses to rule over it, and werewolves, incubuses and wraiths, he is dabbling in Manichaean dualism, the idea that standing opposed to God's good creation is another, separate and equal, or nearly equal, creation given over to evil."

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As Goldthwaite sees it, whatever Lewis and his close friend J.R.R. Tolkien may have claimed about their work, it is not compatible with true Christian theology. These two men disliked and withdrew from God's creation -- the world as it is -- considering it corrupt, fallen away from an earlier period of grace that, strangely, they associated with various pagan religions. Both Lewis and Tolkien had theories about how pre-Christian myth prefigured the gospels, but Goldthwaite dismisses this as sophistry. Tolkien had an elaborate justification for the Christian value in creating "secondary worlds," but Goldthwaite finds it lacking in any "explanation for why renouncing the world for places lost in the abyss of time should be thought anything but a rejection of God's plan for the world ... Creating a Secondary World, after all, is in effect a declaration that God's creation is deficient." It would be easier to shrug off this claim as excessive if there weren't so much evidence that Lewis and Tolkien considered this world to be just that: deficient -- compared to the fantasy worlds of their own invention.

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 12:37 PM  |