Political correctness has now raised its head is what one
would have thought a stronghold of traditional Christianity — the
work of C.S. Lewis. To be precise, the new film of his
Voyage of
the Dawn Treader, one of the best-selling
“Narnia” series of children’s books.
The Dawn Treader is a revival of an old Irish
form, the Immram, telling of a ship voyaging among islands, with
the crew learning some lesson at each stopping place.
The imaginary world of Narnia is, of course, under the
rule of kings who acknowledge the rule of its Creator, the good
lion Aslan, an attempt by Lewis to make the idea of Christ
accessible to modern children.
However, actor Liam Neeson, who provides the voice of the
lion in the Dawn Treader, has claimed it is also based on
other religious leaders such as Mohammed and Buddha.
In fact there is not the slightest doubt about Aslan’s
identity. In the first Narnia story, The Lion the Witch and the
Wardrobe, Aslan takes on the burden of guild and punishment
for another, undergoes a kind of crucifixion and rises from the
dead. Neither Islam nor Buddhism have remotely comparable
episodes.
Following Lewis’s conversion, the entire body of his
writing apart from his purely scholarly work consisted of Christian
apologetics of one kind or another.
He said on more than one occasion that his purpose behind
writing the Narnia books was to introduce children to Christianity
and to get the Christian message to them “past the watchful
dragons” of modern secularism. He wrote of
Aslan:
He is an invention giving an imaginary answer to the
question, “What might Christ become like if there really were a
world like Narnia, and He chose to be incarnate and die and rise
again in that world as He actually has done in ours?”
Neeson was quoted as saying “he [Aslan] also symbolises
for me Mohammed, Buddha and all the great spiritual leaders and
prophets over the centuries. That’s who Aslan stands for as well as
a mentor figure for kids — that’s what he means for
me.”
Walter Hooper, Lewis’s former secretary and a trustee of
his estate, was quoted as saying the author would have been
outraged: “It is nothing whatever to do with Islam. Lewis would
have simply denied that. He wrote that the ‘whole Narnian story is
about Christ.’ Lewis could not have been clearer.”
Conservative Christian William Oddie, a former
editor of the Catholic Herald,
accused Neeson of “a betrayal of Lewis’s
intention and a shameful distortion.”
Although there are wicked witches and other supernatural
evil creatures threatening the good kingdom of Narnia, the chief
political and military threat to it is Calormene, the great and
cruel empire to the south.
Lewis did not make the Calormenes identical with Muslims.
It is probable that he deliberately made them different in
important ways so the books would not be regarded as simply
anti-Muslim tracts: the Calormenes worship a vulture-headed god
called Tash and, unlike any Muslims, conduct human sacrifices.
There city has statues, which are forbidden in Islam.
However, it is equally obvious and quite unmistakable that
they are meant to be Muslim-like: they are warlike, live
in the hot, desert-like country, are swarthy, wear turbans and run
the slave-trade. Their ruler, the Tisroc, practices polygamy and
his prime minister is known as a chief vizier. The women live is
harem-like seclusion.
The Calormenes government is Oriental despotism. The
Tisroc is a capricious and merciless tyrant. (“Call back the pardon
we wrote for the third cook. I feel manifest within me the
prognostics of indigestion.”) Insulting the Tisroc results, for one
of his subjects, in a short life and a slow death. There are no
Christian values in government.
The Tisroc, who regards “our subjects” as “vile,” in
The Horse and His Boy plots the death of his eldest son
before the son can assassinate him, remarking: “I have eighteen
other sons and Rabadash, in the manner of the eldest sons of kings,
was beginning to be dangerous. More than five Tisrocs in Tashban
have died before their time because their eldest sons, enlightened
princes, grew tired of waiting for their throne.”
The state of Calormene law is indicated by the fact that
“there is only one traffic regulation, which is that everyone who
is less important has to get out of the way for everyone who is
more important.” The Narnians, by contrast, though we do not hear
much about their organized religion, try to live by
Christian-like values and an idealized version of medieval
chivalry, and to revere the Lordship of Aslan in actions as well as
words.
The Calormenes regard peace with the Narnians as no more
than temporary truces, are always trying to conquer Narnia and in
the end, in The Last Battle, succeed. The Calormen names,
such as Arsheesh, Ahoshta, Lasaraleen and Rabadash, are not
specifically Muslim but have a kind of Arabic sound to
them.
As Narnia represents the Christian and classical
heritage of Europe (it has beings from classical pagan mythology
such as fauns and dryads as well as “northern” fairy-tale creatures
and talking animals), so Calormen represents perpetual the
infidel threat to it. Buddhism, incidentally, is simply not
mentioned in the stories at all (I am at least grateful that
writing this has given me a chance to re-read them).
Further, it is made clear that Aslan-Christ is, under the
Emperor-Over-Sea (God the Father), the only good God. No syncretism
is possible. In The Last Battle a phony syncretic
religion, running together Aslan and Task is concocted by Calormene
crooks and slave-traders. A bewildered and exploited donkey wearing
a lion-skin is presented as “Tashlan” to fool the Narnian animals
into obeying the Calormenes. It is seen as a sign, literally, the
“End Times” of terminal degeneration and decay ushering in the end
of not just Narnia but Calormene and the whole Narnian-created
universe.
The good Calormenes are saved at the end in The Last
Battle not because Tash who they sincerely worshipped had any
aspects of goodness, or identity with Aslan but because Aslan
claims that any good action, even if done in another’s name, is his
own. Lewis made the same point in The Screwtape Letters,
in which the demon Screwtape complained that God saved the souls of
men who died in a bad cause “on the monstrously sophistical grounds
that they were serving the best cause they knew.” This is about as
far from syncretism as it is possible to get.
