I've been reading The Chronicles of Narnia to my kids at night, living the adventures for the first time myself as we tag along with the Pevensie children. Every chapter a narrative feat, every sentence a delicate marvel, the books are magnificent. I covet the gravity of his style keenly, my addiction to adverbs notwithstanding. Yet I quarrel with the direction his ideas, heatedly. Generally my objections are a predictable umbrage at the narrative outcroppings of Lewis's class-bound, gender-biased, mid-century smugness. But sometimes, more substantively, my objections are theological.
In particular I argue with his series-long exploration of the meaning of faith, a question that he often exercises as a plot hinge. At a crucial point in Prince Caspian, the fourth book in the series, Aslan asks Lucy to instruct the other children to follow him through the dark of night down a treacherous path into an unknown gulch. The catch is that Lucy alone can see Aslan; the other children are unable to sense or communicate with him in any way. They're asked to rely on Lucy, and through her on the absent or invisible Aslan, even though he has withheld every means of confirming or even corroborating his presence.
When I read it with my children, this episode from Prince Caspian bothered me: why would Aslan set his children a test rigged against them? Not a test of obedience based on trust, not an Abrahamic test, but a test of obedience in which almost every basis for trust was withheld?
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