Attacking the Chronicles

The film version of C.S. Lewis’ classic “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe” recently arrived in theatres. If you read the book as a kid, or, like me, had it read to you, you would very likely be surprised by some of the ink that has recently been spilled over its screen adaptation. In a culture corrupted by filth and overflowing with movies whose artistic merit is alternately minimal or non-existent, it is odd that a film and a story as well-crafted and as beautiful as “Narnia” have been the target of such vitriol.

According to some of its more unapologetic critics, Lewis’ story is the representation of “everything that is most hateful about religion.” Additionally, viewers might need a “sickbag” to get through watching it—Lewis himself is a “bigot” and fans of his work are “unhinged.” From critics who cast themselves as the truly enlightened and compassionate, these are curious words to describe a wildly popular work of children’s literature. In the public sphere, though, once religion is involved, the rhetorical gloves and most aspects of logical thought are inevitably set aside.

Epithets against Christianity are, of course, not new—it was compared unfavorably to cannibalism almost two millennia ago—and so what is most pertinent are the actual arguments advanced against “Narnia” and the religion it so clearly represents.

Among all of the harping about Lewis’ work, perhaps the most unsound is the tendency to utilize J. R. R. Tolkien’s muted disapproval of the work—“It really won’t do, you know!”—as “proof” that Lewis is all wrong. Tolkien was, of course, a devout and serious Christian believer who succeeded in converting Lewis from militant atheism. Somehow, critics imply, this should mean that Lewis’ work is sub par or meaningless. Why Tolkien’s critique should disqualify Lewis’ work is not clear, unless one expects Christians to have identical worldviews and opinions, and to march in a rigid theological lockstep. One could, of course, advance this argument, but it is fundamentally unserious.

This is not to say that Lewis’ work is flawless or that the theology of “Narnia” is particularly persuasive. There are serious problems in confusing the Biblical Jesus with Aslan the lion, and evil in the real world is never personified as clearly as it is in the White Witch and her coterie of demons and beasts. Lewis did not, however, write the “Chronicles” to be a finely tuned theological treatise; he wrote it as a children’s story. If one tries to read it as some sort of gospel—the “Gospel according to Tumnus,” according to some movie reviews—one will of course be left unsatisfied.

There are serious arguments that can be made against the sort of religion advocated by Lewis, and, if one wants to tangle with the man’s philosophy, there are plenty of better targets than “Narnia.” Yet simply dismissing the Narnia books as advocates of “a view of life” that is so “hideous and cruel” as to make mere consideration of it repulsive helps no one, and is merely evidence of closed-mindedness and bigotry—bigotry far worse than any of which Lewis is guilty.



Mark A. Adomanis ’07, a Crimson editorial editor, is a government concentrator in Eliot House.