(urth) Lupiverse(es)
David Stockhoff
dstockhoff at verizon.net
Thu Mar 15 17:01:06 PDT 2012
On 3/15/2012 7:22 PM, James Wynn wrote:
> For the record, I never had any problem seeing the allegorical parts
> in LWW or the Silver Chair (the most allegorical of all the stories).
> TLB is not even allegorical. It's merely eschatological. Given who
> Aslan was revealed to be in "The Magician's Nephew", it is inevitable
> that he would play the role he did at the end of the the Narnian world.
>
> If one sees materialism as an "oppositional identity" to Christianity
> (and all young materialist in the West do because that is almost
> always their only counter-example), then you are likely to feel
> chaffing at Aslan's role in TLB. But Aslan's plays the same role in
> TLB as he does in ALL the other book. He shows up at the end to sort
> things out and sends the characters on their way. But only if one
> associates End-of-the-World stories SOLELY with Christianity would one
> suddenly realize in TLB that Aslan is Jesus.
>
> But there is sooo much more to Narnia than the Christian allegory.
> Almost all of it is, as Lewis called it, a stew with lots of familiar
> flavors rather than a lock-and-key allegory. It's just that there are
> a few clumps of beefy allegory in there as well.
>
> In fact, being young and recognizing the allegories in the story made
> "The Last Battle" quite confusing for me, I think. Because Lewis has
> a very idiosyncratic theology (it certainly wouldn't jive with
> Presbyterianism). If, because of one's youth, he is unaware that
> there are so many subtle shades of Christian belief, he will surely
> have a WTH reaction. And I did.
>
> So TLB would be better if it were read by an older, more worldly
> person who can both recognize how different Aslan is from our Standard
> Jesus and is willing to accept that that is okay. Or someone who has
> had the time between the first book to the last to familiarize himself
> with some of Lewis's other writers ("The Great Divorce", "Til We Have
> Faces", "Pilgrims Regress")
I'm sure I would have done better with Aslan et al. had I realized that
different points of view were permitted, let alone existed, within
Christianity. I was probably more familiar with other religions than I
was with the shades within it, and so assumed it was monolithic and
thus---the worst crime of all to a kid---boring. Never mind that I
didn't believe in it; I didn't believe in Middle-earth either.
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