When I was a school headmaster, I taught one Chronicles of Narnia novel each year to every grade from kindergarten through fifth, a scheduling trick that let me know every child in the school. I read them in the order C.S. Lewis published them, not the chronological order Netflix has chosen. A 5-year-old should meet Aslan the way the Pevensies do, as a rumor in a frozen country, years before he’s ready to watch that lion sing a world into being.
Fifth graders got The Magician’s Nephew. They were old enough to perceive Genesis beneath its creation story and young enough to gasp when the tree Digory grew from a Narnian apple blows down, and its timber becomes a wardrobe. I’ll never forget the face of a boy in the back row as the significance dawned on him. It was the same look I’d seen on the kindergarteners when Aslan rose from the Stone Table.
In the Republic, Socrates says that “the beginning is the most important part of any work, especially in the case of a young and tender thing.” Greta Gerwig has chosen the wrong beginning twice over: the wrong book to start a child with and the wrong face for the lion. Her Magician’s Nephew, which she calls a rock opera, will introduce Aslan to millions of children. On Empire Magazine’s new cover, that Aslan has one blue eye and one amber, rainbow whiskers, dragon-scaled skin, and a red-striped face modeled on David Bowie. A woman, Meryl Streep, will supply the voice.
Much of the right reacted the way you’d expect, and some of it the way you’d hope. But Tim Rice went to The Daily Wire to tell conservatives to calm down. Aslan isn’t Jesus, his headline said. He’s a lion.
A popular meme shows an indignant J.R.R. Tolkien protesting that you can’t put obvious allegory in your writing, while a grinning Lewis replies, “Haha, Lion Jesus goes rawr.” The joke, though worth a chuckle, gets Lewis wrong. He denied that Narnia was allegory at all. Aslan, he told a correspondent in 1958, was a “supposal”: what Christ might become if He were incarnate, died, and rose again in a world like Narnia. When an 11-year-old named Hila Newman wrote to ask Aslan’s name in our world, Lewis told her to guess and reminded her of someone here who “gave himself up for someone else’s fault to be jeered at and killed by wicked people.” Rice has it backwards. Aslan is not a lion who stands for Jesus; he is Christ, supposed to have become a lion. On Lewis’ terms, Gerwig is choosing the face Christ wears in Narnia.
Rice’s deeper claim is that you can’t desecrate what isn’t sacred. His family, he assures us, doesn’t kneel before a wooden lion on Sunday mornings. Nobody worships a flag either, but try burning one outside a VFW hall and telling the men inside it’s only cloth. Desecration has never required an altar. In The Abolition of Man, Lewis defends the old conviction that the man who calls a waterfall sublime is saying something true about the waterfall, and that education trains children to give things their due esteem. Christians have honored images of Christ for 2,000 years without mistaking the wood for God, and none has thought a man could spit on a crucifix without spitting at Christ.
In Planet Narnia, Michael Ward presented compelling evidence that each chronicle is keyed to one of the seven planets of the medieval heavens, and that Aslan takes on the character of each: the king in Jupiter’s book, the warrior in that of Mars, the light in the sun’s, the Word in Mercury’s, and the judge at time’s end in Saturn’s. Lewis multiplied his images of Christ so none could harden into an idol, and each one points back to the One in whom, as Colossians says, all things hold together. The Magician’s Nephew belongs to Venus, but to the fruitful Venus. The animals rise from the earth in pairs, and Narnia’s first king and queen are told they will be “father and mother of many kings.” The book’s counterfeit Venus, dazzling and barren, is Jadis. An androgynous glam lion belongs on the witch’s side of that book.
“David Bowie saved my life,” Gerwig candidly told Empire. Bowie’s genius was the persona: The androgynous rock messiah Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane, the Thin White Duke, and so on — each mask retired once exhausted, with a Brixton boy named David Jones somewhere underneath them all, or nowhere. That is the gospel Gerwig is painting onto Aslan’s face: salvation by self-invention. Lewis’ seven faces cohere because there is a Person at the center; Bowie’s masks thrilled audiences because there might be no one behind them. In 1970, a lyricist named Tim Rice reduced Christ to a rock star with Jesus Christ Superstar. Fifty-six years later, a different Tim Rice assures us the Bowie lion is harmless.
Lewis had a name for people who do this. In Abolition, he contrasts teachers who deal with pupils “as grown birds deal with young birds when they teach them to fly,” with the modern educator, who deals with them as “the poultry-keeper deals with young birds — making them thus or thus for purposes of which the birds know nothing.” His “Conditioners” “decide what kind of conscience they will produce.”
Christopher Nolan did it to Homer this year, turning Odysseus into a trauma patient. But Nolan’s film is rated R; Gerwig’s, expected to be PG, is aimed at children, the Conditioners’ real audience. Lewis explains why. “The little human animal will not at first have the right responses,” he writes in Abolition; its loves must be trained long before it can give reasons for them. Children breathe a story in; they don’t audit it. A Bowie Aslan will train them as surely as Lewis’ did.
There are wars and inflation, Rice reminds us, so save the outrage for things that matter. Rice concedes that the stories we tell ourselves matter. He just hasn’t noticed that this one is being told to his children.
In The Silver Chair, the moon’s book, whose Aslan is the obedient Son, the Queen of Underland makes Rice’s case better than he does. Holding the children and Puddleglum captive underground, she throws a sweet-smelling powder on the fire, strums a slow, droning tune, and softly asks them reasonable questions. Isn’t the sun just a lamp they’ve imagined bigger? Isn’t Aslan just “a bigger and better cat?” Puddleglum breaks the spell by stamping out the fire with his bare foot. Then, with the pain clearing his head, he gives her the only answer the argument deserves: “I’m on Aslan’s side even if there isn’t any Aslan to lead it. I’m going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn’t any Narnia.”
The next generation’s Aslan will be whichever one reaches them first. So read your children the books before the film gets to them. Tell them to guess the lion’s other name. And when someone with a byline tells you Aslan is only a bigger and better cat, put your foot in the fire.
