Aslan and the God of Deism

I continue my series on C. S. Lewis’ character Aslan in comparison to various conceptions of the divine. Click here for the first post.

Another stroke should splinter the idea off our sculpture that God is something wholly other than humans: that God and humans are living, so to call it, on two different planes. Such a worldview is commonly called deism.

Deists believe that God is like a clockmaker who put together this universe, wound up its cogwheels, and is now letting it tick away until the clock has run out. The clock might stand on his bookshelf (figuratively speaking), but he never does anything to it. He does not act into his creation, or—for a deist a preposterous thought—have a relationship with some of the “cogwheels.” He is the Unknowable Clockmaker, the Wholly Other, for us somewhere “out there” but impossible to relate to.

Not so Aslan. Aslan comes bounding over the sea right into Narnia. People can talk to him and touch him, and he talks back and touches them. They can feel his huge and beautifully velveted paws tossing them in the air, they can ride on the soft roughness of his golden back, they can smell the strange and solemn perfume in his mane, and they can hear his warm, sweet breathing and his terrible roar.

Neither is Aslan unknowable in the sense of being morally wholly other than humanity. Some people picture God as either being beyond good and evil, or as having such a completely different idea of goodness that our own idea of goodness counts for nothing. Our “black” may be God’s “white” and our “white” may be God’s “black.” His goodness, and therefore He Himself, is wholly other than ours. And, as C. S. Lewis pointed out, that is the same as saying “God is we know not what.” In the end it turns religion “into a form of devil-worship.”

Narnia, on the other hand, is a world in which even someone who serves a false god can have a pretty accurate idea of true goodness. C. S. Lewis was a firm believer in Natural Law, by which he understood a moral code which is engrained in humanity as a whole and which can give people—Pagan or otherwise—a clue about who God is.

This clue Emeth the Calormene had. We can read in The Last Battle that he was a young man who wholeheartedly served the false god Tash. It was his great desire to know more of Tash, “and if it might be, to look upon his face.” When he eventually met the true God Aslan, he expected to be punished for having served a false god. But instead Aslan told him that all the service he had done to Tash, he would count as service done to himself, and then added,

“No service which is vile can be done to me, and none which is not vile can be done to him. Therefore if any man swear by Tash and keep his oath for the oath’s sake, it is by me that he has truly sworn, though he know it not, and it is I who reward him. And if any man do a cruelty in my name, then, though he says the name of Aslan, it is Tash whom he serves and by Tash his deed is accepted.”

Aslan is not at all the Wholly Other. Neither is Lewis’ God. Every good gift, every light, every true insight that anyone has received comes from Him, whether they know it or not. In almost every human, there is still a reflection of Him—twisted as it might be. For this reason C. S. Lewis did not consider all the religions that we have touched upon as simply wrong all through.

“If you are an atheist,” he wrote, “you do have to believe that the main point in all the religions of the whole world is simply one huge mistake. If you are a Christian, you are free to think that all these religions, even the queerest ones, contain at least some hint of the truth.”

What Aslan Tells Us About Dualism, Pantheism and the Problem of Evil

This continues my last post.

I raise my hand for the next blow: Aslan is not the good guy in a drama of good and evil fighting one another on equal terms. Such a view is called dualism, to which, in order to refute it, Lewis devoted several pages in his Mere Christianity.

There he mentions that he personally thought dualism to be a very manly and sensible creed, but he realized there was a catch in it. The catch is this. If the universe exists of two independent powers of good and evil, who then is the judge between them that decides which one is good and which one evil? Human beings, perhaps? But we are dependant on them and cannot therefore be their judge. You cannot judge a thing from “below.” If fish could talk, they would judge all fishermen to be evil and all human beings of other professions good, but that would hardly be a judgment with which we agreed. Clearly the Judge of these two forces has to be on a higher plane than either of them, and both have to be accountable to Him.

That, however, would lead us away from dualism and into the world of monotheism. Changing the analogy, we can picture the universe of dualism like two boxers fighting each other—but without a referee. And if there is no referee, each boxer can decide for himself what is and is not fair play. Each one can therefore consider himself being the good guy fighting the bad guy. And then we can just as well drop the whole idea of good and evil, and with it, drop the idea of two truly opposite forces fighting at all.

It follows that Aslan and the evil Witch are not equal opponents. The Witch is nothing more than a pathetic rebel against the sovereign Lion, merely one of his creatures who chose wrong over right.

This is well illustrated by an incident in The Magician’s Nephew. There, the Witch flings an iron bar at Aslan’s head, but it has no effect on him whatsoever. It strikes him between the eyes, glances off and falls with a thud into the grass, and the Lion keeps on walking—“neither faster nor slower than before.”

However, only because Aslan is not a “boxer” in a dualistic universe, it does not follow that he is “everything,” as pantheists would have it. He is not both the cancer and the healer, both life and death, creator and destroyer.

When Digory’s mother lies sick in bed, Aslan has “great shining tears” in his eyes. A pantheist would tell Aslan, “If you could but see it from God’s perspective, you would know that the sickness, too, is God.” But Aslan is God, and yet he cries. That is profound. Apparently he endowed some of his creatures with such a power of choice that their choices can grieve him, and yet he is not angry at God (meaning himself) for having “allowed” such evil to exist.

The Religion of the Force (and of the Great Cosmic Emptiness)

(This is a continuation from my last post.)

The next blow is this: Aslan is not a Great Cosmic Consciousness. What with today’s popularity of Eastern religions, the vague idea of a Great Cosmic Consciousness seems to have found its way into many a person’s head. This makes it important to be aware of C. S. Lewis’ total rejection of any such concept when he became a Christian and certainly when he wrote the Chronicles of Narnia. I say “any such concept” because there are almost innumerable variations of this idea on the market—some of them bordering on the absurd and others more rational. Here are two basic ones.

(1) The Force. This term is not taken from a well-known movie epic by George Lucas, but from Lewis’ novel Perelandra, which he wrote long before Luke Skywalker and Han Solo set out to rescue Princess Leia from the clutches of Darth Vader. There—in Perelandra, that is—the villain Weston tells the hero Ransom that he is on a mission to spread “spirituality” and is working, not for himself or humanity, but for Spirit itself. In the subsequent conversation Ransom tries to press Weston to tell him what exactly he understands this Spirit to be, and Weston always evades him by saying in effect that definitions do not matter.

When asked whether this Spirit was in any sense personal or alive, he does not answer the question but provides the obscure picture of “a great, inscrutable Force, pouring up into us from the dark bases of being” —a Force that is not personal and yet can choose its instruments, that can give people purpose and guidance. It is not really alive but is the driving force behind all life.

Pressed further, Weston says that what Ransom considers to be the devil and God “are both pictures of the same Force.” Heaven is “a picture of the perfect spirituality ahead”; hell “a picture of the urge or nisus which is driving us from behind.” When asked what that implies, Weston finally admits that he would do anything that the “Life-Force” was driving him to do, including murdering and lying, since the traditional concepts of good and evil were mere “conventionalities.”

Such is the logical conclusion of living by an ill-defined Force, though most people apparently do not go that far. They only go as far as they want to, because the religion of the Force is one where you can have your cake and eat it too. The Force is neither good nor evil, nor even personal, and therefore cannot make any uncomfortable demands on its subjects, and yet it is powerful enough to give its believers purpose and guidance. That sounds like just the sort of thing that one would expect a made-up religion to be like. C. S. Lewis felt that it did not have that “edge,” that unexpectedness, which reality usually has.

Thus he rejected this kind of Spirit-Force. Aslan is not a mere Force.

(2) The Great Emptiness. This term I did not take from Lewis but thought fittest for describing the Spirit of Zen-Buddhism and similar worldviews, which I already mentioned in Chapter 3 of Book I. The “Great Emptiness” is in a way the opposite type of Cosmic Consciousness than the Force. It is not the drive behind existence, but the spiritual hole into which one is to fall and “dissolve.” It is a difficult thing to picture because, as a great Zen-Buddhist teacher once said, it is neither non-existent nor does it exist. The very fact that we ask about its existence shows that we have not yet understood it. Trying to understand means not to understand. The quest lies in giving up all reasoning and letting oneself fall into the Great Emptiness: to be “enlightened”: to realize that there is no individual “you” but that you are Buddha, you are God, you are It. There is nothing else.

Lewis did not believe in the Great Emptiness for the simple reason that there is no reason to believe in it. Any worldview that undermines the value of Reason is self-refuting. Lewis believed that Reason is the common ground on which all human beings move, and if anyone tries to convince others that they need to give up Reason, he destroys the very power of convincing them. To use a stock metaphor: He saws off the branch on which he is sitting.

Aslan, therefore, is not an emissary of the Great Emptiness who invites his followers to abandon Reason.

What If Zeus Appeared on Our Doorsteps Today?

In this post, I talked about the overall Christian worldview in the Chronicles of Narnia, with its principles character being of course Aslan, the Story Writer within the story.

This story writer I will now attempt to define more closely. And I think the best way to get to know him is by starting with the negative definition: what Aslan is not like. By so doing, I shall set to work like a sculptor who takes a slab of rock and chips off everything that does not belong to his envisioned piece of art. With each stroke of the hammer, the form of the actual sculpture will become more defined.

The first bold stroke of the hammer, which will drive the chisel deep into the rock and wedge off a considerable part, is the issue of polytheism. C. S. Lewis did not believe in one god among many. Aslan is not the “local deity” of Narnia, because then he could hardly be its creator.

Lewis understood that gods without a capital “G” cannot possibly have created all that exists. Only a self-existing Being is capable of doing so, and a “local deity” is not self-existing. Its existence is always derived from something else. If such a being created the universe, he (or she or it) would himself be living in another universe, and the question would be who (or what) created that universe. And so we could go on indefinitely and never reach an answer. This is a well-known issue in philosophy and has often been called the “infinite regress.”

For this reason the gods do not, in fact, deserve the high name of “God.” They are only “gods” in the sense of “immortals” or “super-humans,” but not in the sense I am trying to define. They are not ultimate existence. They are not the basic Fact from which all other fact-hood is derived. Even supposing there are such gods, they would be mere products of something higher and included within it. If Zeus bodily appeared on our doorsteps today, our search for ultimate reality would still not be over.

More “hammer strokes” in another post.

The Christian Worldview in Narnian History

Questions often lead to even more fundamental questions. If, for instance, you ask, “How reliable are the Gospel documents about Jesus?”, it leads to the more fundamental question, “Are the stories about Jesus even theoretically possible or are they intrinsically impossible?” If you conclude that miracles – at least in theory – are not unreasonable, you might then draw the conclusion that the actual event of a miracle depends on the existence of God. And this, of course, leads to the question, “Is there a God?”

But what kind of God? People have all kinds of ideas as to what or who God is. To say, without further explanation, that miracles depend on the existence of God is therefore meaningless. We might just as well say that miracles depend on the existence of Blank. We need to know what we mean when we use the word God. What kind of God could conceivably exist and be such a God as to work miracles?—to act into Nature?

Yet another issue is not only the nature of God but also, as it were, the nature of Nature. What does creation have to be like so that God can act into it?

A good illustration of such a God and such Nature can be found in C. S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia. Narnia is a world with a linear history, with a beginning and an end, and with (so to speak) a Story Writer within the story. By that I mean a character in the books who made up the whole of Narnia as an author makes up a story.

This Story Writer is Aslan the Lion, the King of Narnia and son of the Emperor-over-the-Sea. It was he who, at the beginning, called up the stars and the sun with a song so beautiful that one could hardly bear it. It was he whose wild tunes made the grassy land bubble “like water in a pot” until it burst and let the animals appear. It was he who chose some of the animals and endowed them with speech and intelligence. It was he who was always on the move when wrong needed to be turned into right. And it was he who, after the sun and the moon had become “one huge ball like a burning coal,” commanded Father Time to make an end of Narnia.

In this brief overview of Narnian history we have already stumbled upon three essential doctrines that Narnia exemplifies: that history is linear, that the world is real (not an illusion as in some Eastern worldviews), and that the world drama has a Story Writer who can act into the world.

Only this God can be a miracle worker. Only He can act into His creation in a meaningful way. If He were not the Source of all creation, then His miraculous powers would be limited, just as our miraculous powers are limited. We would not have discovered miracles beyond our own ability to work miracles, that is, to act into Nature as a force partially independent from Nature. Only a God completely independent from Nature can work completely independently into Nature. 

And if the world were not real but an illusion, any talk of miracles would be nonsensical. There can be no miracles in an illusory world. If ordinary Nature did not exist, neither could extraordinary (miraculous) events exist in that Nature.

Harry Potter and Its Good Values

 

J. K. Rowling’s The Tale of Beedle the Bard, a Harry Potter tie-in, has come out today. That’s a good time to examine the values (or “axiology,” to use a more philosophical term) in Harry Potter.

Before I can do so, however, it is necessary to begin with a word of caution. I would like to remind us of a sound hermeneutical principle: that a story, whether factual or fictitious, does not tell us what should have happened but simply what did happen. Hence, when we read in the Bible that Abraham had several wives or that David lied, this in itself is no justification to do likewise.

Often, the history writers of the Bible neither commended nor condemned the actions of Biblical characters; they simply tried to give an accurate picture of what (from their point of view) actually happened. Value judgments on these historical events are found elsewhere in the Bible: in the Law of the Old Testament and the Epistles as well as Jesus’ teachings of the New Testament. We would draw many wrong conclusions if we read the historical narratives like the Law, or vice versa.

The same principle applies to non-Biblical stories. We need to be careful not to read a story as if it were a written set of moral laws. We would not be the first ones to read values into a story which are not there. When a character does or says a certain thing, it does not follow that the author agrees with it.

However, this does not mean that we cannot determine the axiology of a story at all. We should proceed with caution, but proceed we can. One of the first steps we can make is to determine whether the author put a character into the story who is in some ways a “portrait of the artist.” In other words, if there is someone who voices the opinions and values of the author most strongly. This character can be quite different to the author, but his values match the ones of the artist.

In the Narnia Chronicles, this person is of course Aslan. We can claim quite boldly that whatever Aslan says is in harmony with C. S. Lewis’ own axiology.

In The Lord of the Rings, there is no one quite like Aslan. Instead, there are several characters that seem to corporately voice the author’s axiology, perhaps the most obvious of which is Gandalf. In his mouth are often found words of wisdom that appear to reflect the author’s own mind most strongly.

Now, is there such a person in Harry Potter? I would say Yes. The Great Wizard Dumbledore is most often the author’s mouthpiece, though not as much in the last book as in the first six. His words carry great axiological weight. He is the one who at the close of the first books draws some truth or principle out of the events of the story. Therefore, if we want to know about J. K. Rowling’s own axiology, we should pay close attention to Dumbledore.

Of course there are other ways in which an author can put axiological messages into a story. If he portrays a pedophile as an honest, kind, intelligent, and imitable person, and in contrast to that a child protection agent as a corrupt, cruel, and stupid person, it might lower our barrier toward pedophilia. It certainly does not do the opposite: We do not finish reading the story and feel motivated to report a pedophile to an agency or resist possible pedophilic notions in ourselves.

But my word of caution is that these axiological messages can be easily misunderstood. The author might only want to portray a certain person in a realistic way, and therefore makes him a sinner (as all people are). The kind man might be a pedophile not for axiological purposes at all, but in order to paint a realistic picture of the world we live in, as, arguably, in Nabokov’s Lolita. For certainly there are pedophiles who are otherwise honest, kind, and intelligent. Accordingly, when I look at some of such axiological messages in Harry Potter, bear in mind that I offer my interpretations as suggestions, not as unquestionable facts.

In my next entry, I will post a list of the values I see in Harry Potter.

Is Narnia an Allegory?

The Chronicles of Narnia are undoubtedly one of the most influential works in the history of juvenile literature – delightful for all ages. 

There is, however, no small amount of confusion about the literary type of the Chronicles. Time and again, it is referred to as a “Christian 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. 

Are the Chronicles of 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 concept of Creation, the Incarnation, Redemption, the End of the World, and Heaven and Hell. 

Were C.S. Lewis alive, I think he would be very glad if I could transfer to the readers his view that the Chronicles of Narnia 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.” 

I believe I am right that some people will now think, “But aren’t the Chronicles of Narnia Christian at all? Doesn’t Aslan die and rise again like Jesus did? Isn’t that a representation of the Christian faith? If that isn’t an allegory, what on earth is it?” 

Well, C.S. Lewis called the Chronicles a “supposition.” He wrote the books by saying, “Let us suppose such and such were true and then imagine what would happen.” At first this supposition did not even contain a Christian element, but after Aslan had “bounded into” Narnia, Lewis said, “Let us suppose that reality contained different parallel worlds, and that in one of them the Son of God, as He became Man in our world, became a Lion there, and then imagine what would happen.” 

Now this supposition has a definite Christian element in it; the Christian element is in fact essential to it. But that does not make it an allegory. As we have seen, an allegory is trying to describe a (mostly immaterial) fact in our world by means of a picture, such as Reason being pictured as a sun-bright virgin clad in steel. Aslan, however, does not represent the immaterial God in the same way in which Lady Reason represents Reason. He is the result of a supposition. Granted the supposition, he and all the characters and events in Narnia would have been a physical reality no less than Jesus’ death in first-century Palestine.

Narnia is thus an imaginary world existing in its own right, having grown out of a Christian supposition, but not being an allegory of Christianity. To put it differently, Aslan is Jesus in another world; he is not an allegory of Jesus in our world. 

I would encourage those who still cannot see the difference to read Lewis’s “Pilgrim’s Regress.” Putting it side-by-side with the Chronicles of Narnia should make the distinction plain. 

But no matter whether you agree with Lewis’s view on the question of allegory, no book shelf is complete without the Chronicles of Narnia. One can read them again, and again, and again. 

(By the way, if you like Narnia, you might also enjoy my Fantasy novel The Crack Beneath the Worlds.)