Narnia and The Universal Consciousness

Just back from seeing The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe. It was good, though not mind-blowingly good, and it's been so long since I read the books that I can't be sure it's the source material or what they did with it. From my memory they were remarkably true to the book, but that may say more about my memory than the film. A good two hour romp, with some excellent creatures and effects and a good story.

And so onto the meatier topic......

When I first read The Chronicles of Narnia, of which TLTWATW was once the first book, now supplanted by The Magicians Nephew for chronological reasons, I was oblivious to the Christian allegory that was said to be found there. Even through The Last Battle I was initially unaware that any such intention might be hidden, or not hidden, within what was for me simply a great read. Sure, I got the 'world ends and heaven is a place on earth' (thank you Belinda Carlisle) idea, but how was someone only schooled in the Christian tradition supposed to expect otherwise?

I read them several times, and I would think that by the last reading I would have been aware that maybe something more was going on, but it still seemed like just a great story with an inevitable conclusion. It's probably been twenty years since I last read any of these books, and while my trips through them are in the past, my awareness of allegory, and more specifically, my awareness of people trying to find hidden meanings in all things is all too acute. This desire to see what may not be there runs the gamut from the worst of political correctness to the current 'war on Christmas'. There can be little doubt that the things that people say, write and do are invested with all sorts of meanings, many unintentional and the product of subconscious experience, but sometimes things are less than that, and sometimes they may be more than the individual realizes.

C.S. Lewis was known to have developed a profound Christian faith over the course of his life. If I'm remembering correctly it was something he came into rather than some outgrowth of his childhood experience. That is to say, he became a devout Christian for all the right reasons, rather than because that was what he was brought up to believe and there never really was any other choice. He wrote plenty of books about his faith, but despite all the attempts by people to find it, I don't think that his Narnia tales were among them. And not simply because he said so himself.

The stories in The Bible are not unique. Virgin births, resurrections, you name it, all have found there way into mythologies throughout the world. Don't believe me? Read anything by Joseph Campbell, a man who spent a lifetime studying such things. That's not to take anything away from The Bible, but it does point to the larger idea that is Universal Consciousness. We are all descended from a shared ancestor, and so while we may have developed variety, we have far more in common than not. One of those things is the way our minds work, and the product of this similar functioning is a vast set of mythologies that are often remarkably similar. There is a very interesting article in the latest issue of The Atlantic Monthly that many will find blasphemous, but sane people should take as an interesting food for though.

These shared ideas infuse all of our great stories, and you wouldn't have to consciously set out to include them in order for them to show up. Because Aslan sacrifices himself and is reborn makes him a allegory to Jesus dying on the cross? If that's true why does no one ever refer to the rebirth of Gandalf as Gandalf the White in the same way? CS and JRR were friends. They read their works to one another while teaching at Cambridge (or Oxford, I forget). There certainly are some far more obvious things that come in the later books of Narnia that seem to be stolen intentionally from The Bible, but TLTWATW seems immune to that criticism. It also stands as a far better book than those later ones that wear their allegory on their sleeves.

At the end of it all, it seems that Christians are a very insecure lot. The more vocal of these seem to take every opportunity to invoke their victimhood, despite being memebers of the most powerful and wealthiest religion on Earth. The issues involved are worth several other posts, so I will leave this one as a glancing blow. Needless to say, the fact that this movie is being marketed to Christians as a Christian tale strikes me as both a callous commercial venture (which I've come to be comfortable with generally) and as the latest gambit of the crazy wing of the Christian religion to bloviate on their general underappreciation in the world.

To them I say - suck it up.