Other works we have read so far include:
- "Weight of Glory" in the volume of the same name
- Books I and II of Mere Christianity
- Surprised by Joy (his autobiography)
- "Transposition" in the Weight of Glory volume, which is about being attuned to the spiritual realm beyond the merely material
Since I am a Philistine, I had not read any of these. I saw the 2005 movie of LWW. The lampost allegedly was modeled off a lampost down on Prebends bridge in Durham, just a few strides down on the Bailey from St. John's College where I lived and worked during my doctoral program. Man, those are pleasant memories.
I am not much one for novels, and I find it difficult to get momentum on those rare occasions I have read them. However, I will say that my pace quickened as I got about halfway through this one. I had divided my reading of the book into four days, 60 pages each. The first and second days were tough to keep myself going.
But the last two days of reading flew, and I was genuinely moved at the end.
2. I did not realize how rich a story world Lewis had created. I kept wondering if J. K. Rowling had taken some pointers from Lewis. There is a richness to a series of novels that creates a world. The hardest part is to get the world going. But once a group knows the backstory, a momentum exists that is very forceful.
When a series like Star Trek reboots, there is genuine excitement and richness when you meet old characters you know so well again. That's Uhura. That's Scotty. You can hear clapping as each familiar character takes the stage. Same with Avengers.
Despite how little I knew of the Narnia world, I felt this emotion to meet Reepicheep at the gates of heaven. I knew he had separated from the group in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. There is Mr. Tumnus from LWW. I genuinely didn't know that The Last Battle would culminate and tie together the entire series.
The Magician's Nephew involves the creation of the world of Narnia. In the same way, The Last Battle is the end of Narnia. It is not exactly the end of the world, and I was left with questions about Lewis' understanding of the second coming, even after reading "The World's Last Night." Those who are there at the end are those who have died in the material world. Spoiler alert--a train accident kills the whole lot at once.
I think Lewis believes in the actual return of Christ to the world. But in the story world of Last Battle, the material world still continues on. It is the material Narnia that has ended. Nevertheless, "all worlds draw to an end, except Aslan's own country" (111).
3. Let me get out Lewis' metaphysic here. Lewis' Platonic tendencies are in full display in Last Battle. The physical Narnia they have known, "it was only a shadow or a copy of the real Narnia which has always been here and always will be here: just as our own world, England and all, is only a shadow or copy of something in Aslan's real world" (211-212).
There you have it. I saw the 1993 movie Shadowlands about a part of Lewis' life. Now I know where the term comes from and what it means. It's Plato. The physical realm in which we live is a shadow of the real, heavenly realm. We are currently in the "Shadowlands" (228). In heaven, "you are now looking at the England within England, the real England just as this is the real Narnia" (226).
Digory puts its very clearly when he realizes what's going on--"It's all in Plato, all in Plato" (212). "This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it until now" (213).
So Lewis seems to have a sense that the material world will be destroyed and will cease to exist in the end, and we will all go to live in heaven. This is the view I grew up with as well. In fact, I read it into the book of Hebrews in my scholarly work. Although I haven't published my change of understanding, I have increasingly realized over the years that this understanding simply wasn't existent at the time of Christ. Language of the world's destruction always involves a new creation.
So we have rightly seen a recapturing of the importance of embodiment these last twenty years. The New Testament seems to focus on a new earth and not merely a "cut at the dotted line" and remove the inferior creation.
4. There are a number of fascinating, possibly brilliant, and also some cringe-worthy elements in the story. I'll mention them in order.
The initial "bad guy" in the story is an Ape named "Shift." On one level does he symbolize shallow progress or evolution, as Lewis addresses in "The World's Last Night"? He is smarter than the donkey, but not morally. The donkey (named Puzzle), although not too smart, has the right moral intuitions. He lets himself get talked out of the right courses of action by the Ape.
There are of course moral lessons here. Lewis is exalting a less intelligent person with the right moral instincts over a more educated moral fool. As it turns out, the Ape himself is a pawn in an even higher level evil game. The Ape thinks only of himself and is thus weak, susceptible to the manipulation of a much viler--and cleverer--cat and the Calormene from the south.
5. The depiction of the Calormenes from the south will cause a contemporary person like me to cringe. Lewis makes the bad guys black, and King Tirian disguises himself in black face. At least the black men are bearded. There would be no thought of the imagery this reinforces in Lewis' day. His world was a thoroughly white one. I mentioned in the previous post that Lewis seemed to have no interest in racial justice or "the great campaign against White Slavery."
He thinks nothing of creating a world where the realm and servants of Satan (Tash) are aligned with black-skinned individuals from the south (Africa), the "Darkies" (150).
6. An interesting feature early in the story is the repeated mention that Aslan is not a tame lion. It is perhaps ironic that the unpredictability of God can make it difficult sometimes to discern whether something is the work of God in the world or the work of the Devil! Repeatedly, the "good guys" question their true moral intuitions by overthinking it. "Aslan after all is not a tame lion."
Nevertheless, it can take some time even for the righteous to figure out the difference between what is God and what is not, between what is right and what is not.
7. The proximity of the truth to what the Ape and the deceivers say is sobering. The Ape says, "You think freedom means doing what you like? ... True freedom means doing what I tell you" (39). This would be true if God were speaking. The Ape "apes" the truth.
Indeed, the Ape and his lot innoculate the Dwarfs from the truth. When King Tirian shows them that the donkey is not Aslan, they do not rally to the cause of truth. They are less likely to believe anyone now. "Tirian had never dreamed that one of the results of an Ape's setting up a false Aslan would be to stop people from believing in the real one" (92). "By mixing a little truth with it they had made their lie far stronger" (127).
This is a truly sobering statement and one worth some series reflection. One of the reasons it is important to disciple our children and the children of the church is because faith is much more easily instilled in a child than in a person who is already set in their intellectual ways. College students are often still very malleable when they are encountering ideas for the first time.
But a word of caution. If we set them up with something flimsy, flimsy faith, it will not be so easy to reinstall something more sturdy if it falls apart. And fundamentalist faith is very flimsy. The evangelical church right now is pursuing conspiracy theories and an alternative reality that will blow away with a puff of wind. And what will come of the faith of the children growing up right now in those homes? Will they become "nones"?
8. Lewis uses the cat Ginger and the Calormene Rishda to take faithlessness to a higher level. The Ape is simply out for himself. He is a selfish individual acting only for himself.
The Dwarfs have a group selfishness. "The Dwarfs are for the Dwarfs" (91). This is a slightly higher level selfishness because they are for each other. The Ape is just looking out for number 1. The Dwarfs are out for their group. They will fight any other group that threatens their herd independence.
But the cat and the Calormene leader are out for a higher level evil. This is, by the way, a fear I have for America. What if an Ape comes along, a bit of a buffoon just out for himself. He has no long-term strategy. He's just out for himself, but is clever enough to deceive a lot of good people to his ends. After all, Aslan is not a tame lion.
But what if after the Ape comes a cat with a more strategic and pervasive cunning. What if someone comes behind with the tools of the Ape but a more devastating end? We had been sort out what Aslan is really like before a day like that should try to come.
9. The Dwarfs are quite fascinating. Near the end of the story they appear to be in the same heavenly space as the kings and queens of Narnia. But they think they are in a dark shed eating horrible food (180-86, chapter 13). I'm sure more penetrating reflection has been done on who they symbolize, but I thought of humanism. The Roman Seneca once said in the first century, "The proper study of humanity is humanity." "The Dwarfs are for the Dwarfs."
Perhaps Aslan gives us the key to them. "They will not let us help them. They have chosen cunning instead of belief. Their prison is only in their own minds, yet they are in that prison; and so afraid of being taken in they cannot be taken out" (185-86). I wonder if Lewis had some of his Oxford colleagues in mind here, so clever, and yet so imprisoned.
This scene also reminds one of Lewis' thesis in The Great Divorce. In that story, those in hell could in theory transfer to heaven, but they don't want to. They are blind to their own situation. They are the person whose immediate reaction to heavenly things is disgust rather than longing.
10. The cat and Calormene leader do not believe in Tash any more than they believe in Aslan (98). This is another striking thing about the story. Tash is real (103). The Devil is real.
We had an interesting discussion of this question in the webinar last night. Are the gods that the Romans or Norse people worshiped real, like Tash? If you're like me, you grew up thinking, "Those nice but stupid Romans actually thought Zeus was real."
But at some point I took home 1 Corinthians 10:20. Paul believed that the Greeks of Corinth were sacrificing to demons. So it is not that Athena was real, but there were demons associated with every temple to Athena. We would call them demons rather than gods, but Paul certainly believed there were real, evil spiritual powers associated with pagan temples. Tash is real.
11. Another mistake Lewis exposes is that of pluralism. The cat and Calormene merge Aslan and Tash together into one being--Tashlan (e.g., 126). Of course they don't believe in either. But Lewis is exposing the believe that all gods are more or less the same. You call him Zeus. I call him Yahweh.
Notice that this is different than what happens with the Calormene soldier Emeth ("truth" in Hebrew). Emeth believes in Aslan but calls him Tash (201-205). This is a problem of Emeth's mind rather than heart. Aslan very strongly rejects the hypothesis that he and Tash are one.
"Is it then true," Emeth asks, "that thou and Tash are one?" "The Lion growled so that the earth shook (but it was not against me) and said, 'It is false.'"
So Lewis soundly rejects the idea that all religions are the same or that all gods are the same. What Lewis is arguing is the concept Karl Rahner called, "anonymous Christians." These are individuals whose heart believes in Yahweh even though their head doesn't think so. In Emeth's case, he thought he hated Aslan. But it turned out that it was Aslan that he was worshiping.
"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 Aslan, it is Tash whom he serves and by Tash his deed is accepted" (205). This statement by Aslan reminded me of a statement in Mere Christianity: "We do know that no man can be saved except through Christ; we do not know that only those who know Him can be saved through Him" (II.5).
Bottom line is that Emeth "did not believe in Tash at all" (202).
12. Susan does not make it. "My sister Susan," Lucy says, "is no longer a friend of Narnia" (169). Then we have a cheap shot at lipstick, nylons, and invitations. I experienced this comment as a bit sexist.
Then eternity begins for them. "For them it was only the beginning of he real story... now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on forever: in which every chapter is better than the one before" (228).
