prixmium | (Reply)

I love the Narnia books. I got a beautiful box set of them when I was a kid and I read them all multiple times. (The Horse and His Boy is boring, but the rest are great.)

Aslan and the Emperor are distinct from Jesus and God the Father.

I definitely interpreted them as being the same. In The Last Battle there's a line where the children are in heaven and they meet Aslan and it says something like "He no longer looked to them like a lion", with a capital He in the middle of the sentence. It's been hinted at before but at that point it stops being metaphorical and makes the explicit link that yes, Aslan is God.

Basically any good-intentioned piety was service to Aslan and any badly-intentioned service to a god was to Tash, even if they claimed it was unto Aslan. And while I find some appeal in that too, I can promise you that most professing Christians are extremely one-way-the-only-way minded and aren't even sure that the people at the church down the street are doing it right.

I guess that's reflective of your experience of Christianity. I don't know enough about 1950s Britain to be able to say whether Lewis' view would have been shared by the majority of his peers. There's a certain type of Christianity that is very literal and Biblical, but I don't think that's how Lewis saw things, at least judging by his books. I think the ascribing good faith acts to Aslan even if that person worshipped Tash was Lewis' way of reconciling the fact that good people might follow a different religion and so giving them a way to get into heaven despite worshipping the "wrong" god. Which is unconventional, but I liked it, it's a much kinder idea than the notion that all unbelievers go to hell regardless of their personal virtue.

I guess I would just like to express my frustration with the tendency to equate Narnia with, idk, a mainline protestant thinkpiece?

Yeah, that's understandable. I'm not sure if you're arguing that because it isn't mainstream, that makes it less of an allegory though? These are still Lewis' religious beliefs being conveyed in a form of a fantastical story, and it's not surprising that they don't fit with, say, a conservative American-style Christianity.

I believe it is a human impulse, for personally biased but also just historically observant reasons.

There's scientific evidence for this too. And, well, the entire history of humanity. To my eternal chagrin, rational arguments just don't work (this applies to politics as well, but it's not even about the argument really, whatever it might be, it's about approaching the subject from a completely different set of base principles). One of the problems with conservative-style evangelical Christianity imo is that it has bought into this idea that religious belief must be fact-based and therefore the Bible is to be taken literally and therefore there must be evidence of its historical validity, and frankly this is just not a good way to do religion and leads to the kind of anti-intellectualism you've described while also butting heads with atheistic/scientific circles in a really unfortunate and unproductive way.

This practice of pretending unmarked Christian mythological allusions and concepts are "neutral" is alienating both to people outside the Christian faith and to those within it.

This is interesting. I think you're right that it certainly isn't neutral. Isn't this basically what a Western-centric perspective boils down to though? If I think about the set of cultural concepts/stories etc that I or anyone else born in my particular culture have access to, then this is it. It's December now, there are Christmas decorations all over the place. I celebrate Christmas completely unironically without any religious belief. It's the same with Christian themes, motifs etc, in literature and so on. I don't feel alienated by it. But obviously that isn't the case for everyone.