Phoebe Kate

One day, when Jack was a very old man — oh, in his 50s or so — he wrote a series of books for children and for adults like himself who’d never really grown up either. The stories were about a marvelous imaginary world he called Narnia. To get there, you had to go through a mysterious door hidden behind the coats in a large armoire. Once you arrived there, you found all sorts of fabulous things — talking animals, and evil witches, and enchanted food, and dwarves and fauns, and best of all, a magnificent mystical lion named Aslan who was The King, not just of the beasts but of humans as well. As lions go, he wasn’t safe or tame or even particularly nice (at least not as we normally mean by the word), but he was something much better and more important. He was good — so good, in fact, that he was willing to sacrifice his life for others and break the power of evil over the land of Narnia and its inhabitants forever after. Hooray!

A number of people (mostly church folks, of course) thought Jack’s seven books about the happenings in Narnia were a retelling of Bible events, from creation and the fall of man to the death and resurrection of Jesus and finally to the Battle of Armageddon and the Second Coming of Christ. On the other hand, most children (and some adults) didn’t worry too much what The Chronicles of Narnia “meant” and just enjoyed them. The stories were exciting, but also worthwhile because they said many things that all good men know in their hearts to be true but have a hard time expressing in words for themselves.

Time passed, and Jack the adult man living in the real world (whatever that is) died, like all humans do.

Jack the little boy who never grew up went on to live happily ever after in a wonderful place where no one grows old (or grows up) because time is no more.

And moviemakers, 40 years after his death, went on to turn one of Jack’s books about Narnia, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, into a very expensive and much talked about film scheduled for release shortly before Christmas this year.

Which is all well and good, but those who, thanks to Jack’s books, were lured through the magic door in the wardrobe into the amazing kingdom he created cannot help but wonder a few things. Can Narnia and Tinsel Town, two places as different as night and day and oil and water, find any common ground? Can the Lion lie down with movie moguls and not get up with fleas? Can Hollywood producers perform a miracle or cast a spell to make everyone happy with their movie version of this childhood classic?

Of course, no one can speak for Jack and how he would have felt about this turn of events. But we do know he had some pretty strong things to say about what the real world is like. For instance, he said, “As long as this deliberate refusal to understand things from above, even where such understanding is possible, continues, it is idle to talk of any final victory over materialism.” And he also said, “Enemy-occupied territory is what the world is.” And, “Let’s pray that the human race never escapes from Earth to spread its iniquity elsewhere.” And, “You and I need the strongest spell that can be found to wake us from the evil enchantment of worldliness.”

In other words, Jack would probably think that Aslan and Disney Studios make strange bedfellows. Very strange bedfellows, indeed.

“Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it… it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become.”

— C. S. Lewis

The Chronicles of Narnia is arguably author C. S. Lewis’s most notable literary achievement. At the very least, it is the one that made him a well-known and beloved name in many households in the mid to late 20th century. In October 2004, HarperCollins reissued in one huge and handsome volume the seven books that comprise the series, for the first time arranged in the preferred order of the author. The edition also contains the original artwork of Pauline Baynes and Lewis’s On Writing for Children, an essay remarkable in its insights, considering that its author spent most of his time in the company of musty, rumply old Oxford professors like himself and never had children of his own.

For over half a century a revered work in the canon of children’s literature, the Narnian tales gained particular popularity among mainstream Christians, a receptive audience already familiar with Lewis as a prominent Christian apologist. In England during WWII, he had become a well-known radio personality on the BBC with a series of talks on religion. On September 8, 1947, he made a splash in the U.S. by appearing on the cover of Time with a heading that read: “Oxford’s C. S. Lewis — His Heresy: Christianity.”

Lewis’s fame grew quickly in America. In books such as The Problem of Pain, The Abolition of Man and his famous Mere Christianity, his take on faith was refreshingly no-nonsense, gritty, unsentimental, sufficiently intellectualized to appeal to the well-educated, and above all, practical and as far away from a pie-in-the-sky view of piety as one can get. His irresistible combination of sophisticated urbanity and excruciating sincerity succeeded in winning over even hard-core agnostics and atheists to God’s side — countless people have directly attributed their conversions to Lewis’s influence. He was shrewd enough not make the mistake of trying to prove the existence of God, but instead portrayed belief in the Great Unprovable as the only rational answer for modern-day thinking people.

With a wrenching poignancy and unflinching honesty, he wrote numerous volumes on suffering, grief, loss, the mystery of joy, natural law, human and divine love, his own conversion experience and spiritual journey, offering no easy platitudes or glib recipes for happiness. While critics point out flaws in Lewis’s exegetical logic, his appeal was as a practical-minded realist whose keen insight into human nature was unimpeachable. “We are all fallen creatures,” he wrote, “and very hard to live with,” as well as, “Experience: that most brutal of teachers. But you learn, my God do you learn.” He was also fearless in exposing religious hypocrisy. “It’s so much easier to pray for a bore,” he said in a letter to a friend, “than to go and see one,” and “Everyone says forgiveness is a lovely idea until they have something to forgive.”

Early on, Lewis used his taste and talent for fantasy to great advantage in persuasively presenting Christian ideology to the masses. The Screwtape Letters was a series of letters from an elderly demon to his young nephew regarding the best ways to bring about the eternal damnation of a particular human. In The Great Divorce, Lewis conjectures what might happen if a group of souls headed for hell got the opportunity to visit heaven. To this day, these remain tried-and-true staples on bookstore shelves, a mainstay of Bible studies and at the top of college reading lists for religion courses.

Eventually, the more conservative evangelical circles discovered Lewis’s apologetic works to be an appealing tool for reaching lost souls — after all, he’d been one himself for quite a number of years before, as he phrased it, “I gave in, and admitted God was God” at the age of 33. If anyone did, he knew the mindset of entrenched skeptics and scoffers. His track record in wooing the target audience to religious orthodoxy was so impressive that even dyed-in-the-wool fundamentalists were willing to overlook the fact that Lewis’s denomination-of-choice, the Church of England, did not preach the necessity a “born-again experience” for salvation or hold literalist Biblical interpretation as part of their creed.

When, in the 1950s, the seven books of his epic fantasy The Chronicles of Narnia were published, they found an enthusiastic readership which has continued to grow from the post-WWII era through successive generations of Baby Boomers, Generation X’ers and Generation Y’ers. Lewis’s Christian-scented adventures appealed to practically everybody in the church world. Here were kids’ books you didn’t have to ban or burn or be ashamed of, and written so engagingly that even adults took a liking to them. Here were good solid values and morals served up in a palatable form — and Christological symbols and Biblical parallels (if you wanted to find them there.) The Chronicles of Narnia had everything — unambivalent good won, unmitigated evil lost, plus a noble lion (who could be seen as a type of Christ) who died a substitutionary death for a naughty little boy (who could be seen as representing fallen mankind) and then came back to life and reigned forever — and on top of it, the stories were such grand and colorful adventures that they didn’t seem at all like a Sunday school lesson or a lecture on ‘being good.’

And even if you were a secularist or a non-Christian, well, the religious stuff was sufficiently low-key and not-in-your-face that the books could simply be enjoyed as a damned good read in the fantasy genre.

In short, the perfect book and the perfect candidate for a film.

Or is it?

“What you see and hear depends a good deal on where you are standing; it also depends on what sort of person you are.”

— C. S. Lewis

It is difficult to imagine something as seemingly benign as The Chronicles being the focus of heated controversy, but it appears to have become just that. Depending on whom you’re listening to or what you’re reading, Lewis may be tantamount to God’s spokesperson or Satan’s spawn.

In recent times, Lewis has fallen from grace in some ultra-conservative church circles that believe The Chronicles are no more tame and safe (or Christian) than Aslan the Lion. In the opinion of strict fundamentalists, the faith that Lewis championed amounts to mere “Lewisology,” not “that old time religion.” Critics point to a dangerously muddled theology blending a vibrant and healthy paganism with a watered down Christianity in such a clever way as to lead the unwary reader down a charmingly constructed path of lies to perdition.

Others claim that Lewis was alternatively an occultist, a “crypto-Mormon” whose works incorporated beliefs peculiar to the Church of Latter Day Saints (which, of course, explains why his books are carried in the LDS’s official Deseret bookstores), a secret Papist who elevated the sacraments above the teachings of the Holy Bible, a wolf in sheep’s clothing and a deceiver who used the medium of children’s literature to indoctrinate generations of innocents in the fuzzy, existential, non-absolutist thinking of liberal pseudo-religion (if not something a whole lot worse.)

On top of this, the loose ends and ragged edges of Lewis’s personal life have provided plenty of material for rumor mills and moral watchdogs. Everybody pretty much knows that he spent a good bit of time hanging around pubs with writing cronies such as J.R.R. Tolkien, smoking pipes and lifting a pint or two or three as they discussed their current writing endeavors. This obviously doesn’t win Lewis any points with those who pride themselves on walking the very straightest and most narrow path. However, it’s the unsettling discrepancies between Lewis the Moralist and Lewis the Man that make one do a double take and go, “Huh?” and keep loyal Lewis devotees scrambling to re-polish the sterling reputation of Saint Jack of Oxford. The inescapable conclusion is that Lewis’s life was as muddled as some think his theology was.

Although popular myth would create an aura of celibacy around Lewis in his pre-saved and pre-marriage days, he was in all probability sexually active before his conversion and after as well. In particular, his longtime ambiguous relationship with a certain Mrs. Moore seems to make everybody quite nervous, even his biographers. For 40 years spanning both pre- and post-conversion time frames, he shared living accommodations with Janie “Minto” Moore, a woman 26 years his senior who was the mother of a close friend who’d died. How intimately they actually lived is unknown, but the proverbial appearance of evil has hung like a dark cloud over a man who championed morality in print.

Even his marriage at the age of 58 to American writer Joy Davidman Gresham stirred up dust clouds of controversy, both at the time and to this day. When they first became acquainted, initially through correspondence and later in person when she spent four months in London, Joy was married, apparently unhappily, to another man. A few months after she visited Lewis in England, Joy’s husband William Gresham (who had not accompanied her on the London trip) sued for divorce on the grounds of desertion, and Joy left the States with their two sons to move to England. Lewis and Joy resumed a relationship that was, in some eyes, verging on scandalous. He even footed the bill for her sons to attend private school and paid for her apartment a mile from his own home in Oxford.

When they were finally wed in a civil ceremony several years later, the fact that he had a married a divorcee much younger than himself who was Jewish (although she had converted to Christianity), had two young children and once been a Communist sympathizer didn’t set well with his circle of friends and associates. To this day, all the major questions remain frustratingly unanswered. Did Lewis marry Joy out of love or to save her from deportation when the British government refused to renew her visa? In fact, did he ever intend to marry her at all? Did Joy’s son Douglas find them in a “compromising position” in his mother’s bedroom before their marriage (as he reputedly told someone and then later denied) or was their relationship platonic? Was Lewis just an incredibly generous friend or was Joy Gresham really a kept woman, as circumstantial evidence might well lead people to believe? Was the 1993 film Shadowlands an accurate portrayal of Lewis and Joy’s romance or a fictionalized piece of Hollywood fluff?

The more one reads, the more one realizes there is no agreement on Lewis’s life anymore than there is a consensus of opinion on The Chronicles of Narnia. Though Lewis’s detractors continue to glom onto any crumb of impropriety and his ardent admirers gloss over the more dubious parts of Lewisian history, he remains an enigma, knowable only through his writings. Like the sea that refuses to give up its dead, Lewis’s life does not yield its deepest secrets.

While the broad-minded feel that snooping in someone’s bedroom is tacky, conservative Christians are adamant that Lewis’s private conduct is of tremendous importance. For them, moral laxity points to only one thing — his conversion experience was false in that it did little or nothing to curb his carnality, as conversion experiences from Saint Augustine to Franklin Graham are supposed to do. The conclusion is that Lewis was never really “saved and sanctified,” and his subsequent writings (which include The Chronicles) are, at the very least, pharisaical and at the very worst, diabolical — something which impressionable young minds should be protected from and God-fearing adults warned to steer clear of.

Were Lewis alive today, he would probably be dismayed, not so much at his character being impugned or the brouhaha about his books, but rather at the mentality that feeds the flames of self-righteous abnegation and judgmentalism. In one of his books, he wrote:

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most repressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies.

In an era where many feel that they are the sole possessors of “truth” with a capital “T” and have an almost prophetic calling to be not only the guardians but the arbiters of the public’s morality, it is not surprising that everything, deserving or not, gets put under a microscope and examined for traces of spiritual contamination. The Narnia books are no exception, as well-meaning and scrupulous believers evaluate every line and scene and character for 100% pure Christianity. But even this litmus test is suspect — one tends to find in literature what one expects or wants to find, negative or positive. It is hard, if not impossible, for people to render an objective judgment when dealing with subjects that cut so close to the bone of the beliefs upon which they have staked their lives and souls.

However, it is an exercise in reductionism to attempt to give The Chronicles an across-the-board allegorical interpretation. The obvious truth is that the books are one big, eclectic, colorful grab bag of symbols and images drawn from many sources.

And like it or not, that’s exactly the way Jack Lewis the boy who never grew up wanted it.

“I put in what I would have liked to read when I was a child and what I still like reading now that I’m in my 50s … It [The Chronicles of Narnia] all began with images: a faun carrying an umbrella, a queen on a sledge, a magnificent lion…. There wasn’t anything Christian about them; that element pushed itself in of its own accord.”

— C. S. Lewis

The crux of the debate about The Chronicles comes down to a very simple question: why did a respected scholar like Lewis spend the latter years of his life writing fantasy books for a juvenile audience? Was his motivation to proselytize children through ‘Christian’ fairy tales? Are they apologue or amusement? Or was the old duffer simply getting a bit soft in the head?

Lewis went on the record numerous times about The Chronicles. He consistently maintained that they were not intended as allegorical and termed them ’suppositional,’ or as we’d put it now, ‘alternative history.’ In a letter, he wrote:

If Aslan represented the immaterial Deity in the same way in which Giant Despair represents despair, he would be an allegorical figure. In reality however 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?’ This is not allegory at all.”

Lewis was playing a grand game of “What if?” with himself and ultimately with his readers, and he included every bit of myth and lore that had ever appealed to him. As a classicist, he drew from Norse, Greek and Roman mythologies, medieval literature, Aztec traditions, familiar folk motifs, Irish and English fairy tales, and children’s book writers of earlier periods, such as George MacDonald, Beatrix Potter, and Kenneth Grahame. He used basic Christian themes as the foundations of plot and structure. He also threw in, for good measure, some personal beliefs not specifically backed up by the Bible, such as animals possessing souls and the possibility of non-Christian seekers of truth going to heaven. In a startling passage in The Last Battle, the final book of the series, Lewis has Aslan welcome into his kingdom a servant of his enemy Tash with the words:

Therefore, if any man swear by Tash and keep his oath for the oath’s sake, it is by me he has truly sworn … and I who reward him. And if any man do a cruelty in my name, though he says the name Aslan, it is Tash whom he serves and by Tash his deed is accepted.”

The critics who point out the dicey blend of paganism and Christianity in The Chronicles are correct in their observations. But they forget or overlook the fact that he wrote it primarily for his own pleasure, and secondarily as children’s stories with an extraordinarily rich and broad cultural context.

More significant, psychologically, is the period of his life when he undertook the Narnian endeavor. He was well ensconced in midlife, not a very pleasant or easy passage for anyone. Lewis himself wrote: “The long, dull, monotonous years of middle-aged prosperity or middle-aged adversity are excellent campaigning weather for the devil.” There’s reason to believe he was tired, world-weary, bored, a bit melancholic and in spite of his faith, haunted by that peculiar angst known for rearing its ugly head after one passes the half-century mark.

In particular, he may not have been particularly happy with circumstances in his life. His good friend and author of The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien had not had a favorable reaction upon reading a draft of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe; he felt it was a mishmash of ideas and images and not viable as a book. (Tolkien, interestingly enough, had not been enthusiastic about his pop culture-flavored theology books, either.) Considering their closeness and mutual respect for one another’s work, this could well have been a contributing factor to Lewis’s depressed state of mind.

Add to this midlife emotional stewpot the fact that his longtime companion and housemate, Mrs. Moore, had died after a long illness and that must have been difficult for him to deal with. There is evidence he may have felt he’d wasted valuable years of his life on what amounted to a rather strange and demanding relationship. Moreover, it must have also brought back unhappy memories of the death of his own mother when he was nine, a traumatic event that ended any possibility of an idyllic childhood and inevitably shoved him into a premature quasi-adulthood that was anything but pleasant, from the accounts of it.

It’s easy to see how the idea of retreating into fairy tales where the promise of happy endings never fails and trying to recapture, at least in a literary sense, the simple and sunny childhood he lost so early must have been a very appealing one to Lewis. So, was he getting a bit soft in the head then?

Probably not. More likely, Jack Lewis had simply found his real self again, the little boy who had been there all along, cleverly hiding under the robes of an Oxford don.