Comment: The paganism of Narnia

By Peter T. Chattaway

THE CHRONICLES of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe comes to movie theatres December 9, and when it does, many Christians will be watching it eagerly to see if director Andrew Adamson (or "son of Adam!") has respected the story's Christian elements.

Some of us, however, will be watching just as closely to see if the film has preserved those bits in C.S. Lewis's book that are a little more, shall we say, pagan. Presumably, the centaurs and fauns will look more or less like the mythological creatures depicted in ancient Greco-Roman art. But will, say, Mr Tumnus regale Lucy with stories of how the Roman god Bacchus filled the streams with wine when he feasted with the forest people?

Many Christians, including those who hope to use this film as an evangelistic tool, tend to excuse the pagan elements in Lewis's books as just so much window dressing; as far as they are concerned, all that stuff is the fairy-tale bait he had to set to lure unbelievers into his Christian world. But there is much more to Lewis's use of pagan myth than that.

In all of his writings, Lewis was confronting a modern, skeptical, materialistic view of the world that had no room for the supernatural. Lewis believed that paganism and Christianity had more in common with each other on this point than either had with the modern, secularized world. In the essay 'Is Theism Important?', he wrote:

"When grave persons express their fear that England is relapsing into Paganism, I am tempted to reply, 'Would that she were.' For I do not think it at all likely that we shall ever see Parliament opened by the slaughtering of a garlanded white bull in the House of Lords or Cabinet Ministers leaving sandwiches in Hyde Park as an offering for the Dryads.

"If such a state of affairs came about, then the Christian apologist would have something to work on. For a Pagan, as history shows, is a man eminently convertible to Christianity. He is essentially the pre-Christian, or sub-Christian, religious man. The post-Christian man of our day differs from him as much as a divorcee differs from a virgin."

In 'The Chronicles of Narnia,' Lewis caricatures modernism, and the belief in "progress" that accompanied it, in his description of the Scrubbs family. In The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, he writes that Eustace's parents "were very up-to-date and advanced people. They were vegetarians, non-smokers and teetotallers and wore a special kind of underclothes."

In the next book, The Silver Chair, Lewis goes on to describe Eustace's school, Experiment House, as a place where the Bible and books of fantasy are both discouraged. The bullies there are inadvertently encouraged by the school authorities because their deeds are not seen as wrong, but as something that makes them "interesting psychological cases."

So on one level, the world of Narnia represents an escape from our modern, rationalist way of seeing the world. But the land of Narnia is itself infected by skepticism and a disregard for the past. There is only a hint of this theme in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, when Lucy glances over Mr Tumnus's bookshelf and sees titles like "Is Man a Myth?".

However, the following book, Prince Caspian, makes Lewis's message plain. One thousand years later in Narnian time, a race known as the Telmarines have come to rule the land, and the usurper King Miraz forbids his nephew Caspian to entertain any stories about dwarves, talking animals, or especially Kings Peter and Edmund and Queens Susan and Lucy.

Prince Caspian is ultimately about how the "Old Narnians" reclaim their land from Miraz and his entourage, with help from several sources. There is Aslan, of course, and also the ancient Kings and Queens themselves; the four children have become young again in our world, but when Caspian summons them to Narnia, they retain their royal authority.

But Narnia is also liberated with help from Bacchus and his drinking buddy Silenus, figures from Greco-Roman myth who were associated with drunken, mystical celebrations in the forest called "bacchanals". Bacchus and Aslan even dance together, along with Lucy, Susan, the nymphs and the maenads. And as they pass through Narnia, they destroy a boys' school and a girls' school where the children are taught a politically approved form of "history."

Lewis even seems to flirt with something like astrology. In more than one book, Narnian centaurs look for signs in the stars. In Dawn Treader, Eustace meets a man who is a "retired" star, and says, "In our world, a star is a huge ball of flaming gas." The star replies, "Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is but only what it is made of."

Scenes like these might have been shocking to the early Christians, who saw themselves in direct competition with paganism, and sometimes condemned the gods as demons in disguise. Lewis, however, stood this idea on its head, imagining in his 'Space Trilogy' that the gods were distant echoes of heavenly angels who oversaw the planets.

To be sure, Lewis "baptized" these pagan elements, by situating them in a context where Aslan, the Christ-like creator of Narnia, is firmly in control. When the dance with the maenads comes to an end, Susan says, "I wouldn't have felt very safe with Bacchus and all his wild girls if we'd met them without Aslan." Lucy replies, "I should think not."

Lewis also firmly rejects certain kinds of magic, and certain kinds of gods. In The Silver Chair, Jill suggests calling on Aslan by reciting charms and spells, and Eustace says, "I've an idea that all those circles and things are rather rot. I don't think he'd like them. It would look as if we thought we could make him do things. But really, we can only ask him."

Similarly, in The Last Battle, a foreigner named Emeth who worshipped the evil god Tash is accepted by Aslan into a heavenly afterlife, because those who do "vile" things are truly serving Tash, whereas those who do good are truly serving Aslan. By doing good, Aslan says, they show that their desire is really for him, and "all find what they truly seek."

As Catholic critic Steven D. Greydanus has said, the Narnia stories are doubly apologetic. On the one hand, they introduce the non-Christian reader to stories with a Christian sensibility. But they also constitute an intriguing defense of pagan mythology -- a defense that may not be welcome in some modern churches. As the author of Mere Christianity himself might say, the Narnian stories are Christian, but they are not merely that.