Okay. You say But if Aslan is in the story, he has to be written as he is in canon: as the immortal, all-powerful, not safe but good, Creator son of the Emperor-Over-the-Sea who has conquered death. That's how he's portrayed in the stories and that's how he should be written.
I agree with most of that. However, I don't think that this portrayal necessarily links Aslan to Jesus, for two reasons.
First, I know that it is possible to read the Chronicles of Narnia without ever linking Aslan to Jesus. That's how I first read the books, and how I continued to read them for four or five years, until someone explicitly pointed out that Lewis had most likely written Aslan as an analogue of Jesus. Once that idea was part of my mental arsenal, I was able to see a lot of the analogies, references, and so on. However, the books work perfectly well if you consider Aslan as a fictional entity unto himself and do not carry any Christian baggage with you.
In that reading, Aslan first appears as a sort of magical lion (in LWW) who does not conquer death of his own power, but rather takes advantage of a loophole in the rules that Jadis doesn't know about. He is talked about as a temporal king and does things like organize armies, which did not in any way remind me of Jesus (who very definitely removes himself from all temporal power). In PC, Aslan's presence in Narnia a thousand years later and the question of believing in his presence begins to shift his portrayal from 'magical lion' to 'lion-god,' but the presence of Bacchus and the river god makes him seem the chief god of a pantheon rather than a Christian figure. In VotDT, Aslan is portrayed even more as a deity (what with the transformations and the vision of his country beyond the rim of the world), but once again, he works perfectly well as a fictional god of a fictional world. I know that he says he is also present in our world, and under a different name, but my assumption was that he existed in our world as a pagan lion-god of some sort -- perhaps from Egypt or Mesopotamia, or some other area in the ancient world where people would have been familiar with the Greek ideas of dryads, naiads, satyrs, etc. (And nothing is said within the book to directly contradict that assumption.)
In SC, we get another glimpse of Aslan's country, and for the first time he seems to have direct power over life and death (instead of simply gaming the Emperor's rules), when he 'resurrects' Caspian. But again, while the implication is that he's a god who has power over or influence in many worlds, the story continues to work if you assume that he's a lion god in a pluralistic religion. In HaHB, we see more evidence of Aslan's power and transformational skills, but there is, interestingly, nothing to suggest that the Calormene gods don't exist as well -- in fact, my automatic assumption was that of course they were real -- and that while Aslan is presumably stronger than they are (since he can override whatever protection Tash may have given Rabadash), they're still all the same type of being.
MN continues to increase Aslan's power -- he is now the creator-god of the Narnian world -- but given that the pool was already present in the Wood Between the Worlds, and there was bare earth to stand on and air to breathe, my assumption was that somebody or something (maybe the Emperor-Beyond-the-Sea, maybe natural laws working according to blind chance) had already created the world, and Aslan simply moved in and decided to wake it up and decorate it. Also, while he is shown as present in Narnia and in his own country (which apparently has connections to all worlds), he is neither shown nor described as ever having been present in Charn, and I took that as evidence that he is not all-powerful nor omnipresent. (In a related point, and I realize this may not agree with your beliefs or with Lewis's, my general impression of the Christian God and the risen Christ were always of disembodied spiritual forces -- at least in the way they touched the world after Jesus ascended to heaven -- and Aslan always seemed physically present, which made it even less likely for me to connect him to Jesus.)
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REALLY long comment, part 1
Date: 2009-05-07 02:09 am (UTC)I agree with most of that. However, I don't think that this portrayal necessarily links Aslan to Jesus, for two reasons.
First, I know that it is possible to read the Chronicles of Narnia without ever linking Aslan to Jesus. That's how I first read the books, and how I continued to read them for four or five years, until someone explicitly pointed out that Lewis had most likely written Aslan as an analogue of Jesus. Once that idea was part of my mental arsenal, I was able to see a lot of the analogies, references, and so on. However, the books work perfectly well if you consider Aslan as a fictional entity unto himself and do not carry any Christian baggage with you.
In that reading, Aslan first appears as a sort of magical lion (in LWW) who does not conquer death of his own power, but rather takes advantage of a loophole in the rules that Jadis doesn't know about. He is talked about as a temporal king and does things like organize armies, which did not in any way remind me of Jesus (who very definitely removes himself from all temporal power). In PC, Aslan's presence in Narnia a thousand years later and the question of believing in his presence begins to shift his portrayal from 'magical lion' to 'lion-god,' but the presence of Bacchus and the river god makes him seem the chief god of a pantheon rather than a Christian figure. In VotDT, Aslan is portrayed even more as a deity (what with the transformations and the vision of his country beyond the rim of the world), but once again, he works perfectly well as a fictional god of a fictional world. I know that he says he is also present in our world, and under a different name, but my assumption was that he existed in our world as a pagan lion-god of some sort -- perhaps from Egypt or Mesopotamia, or some other area in the ancient world where people would have been familiar with the Greek ideas of dryads, naiads, satyrs, etc. (And nothing is said within the book to directly contradict that assumption.)
In SC, we get another glimpse of Aslan's country, and for the first time he seems to have direct power over life and death (instead of simply gaming the Emperor's rules), when he 'resurrects' Caspian. But again, while the implication is that he's a god who has power over or influence in many worlds, the story continues to work if you assume that he's a lion god in a pluralistic religion. In HaHB, we see more evidence of Aslan's power and transformational skills, but there is, interestingly, nothing to suggest that the Calormene gods don't exist as well -- in fact, my automatic assumption was that of course they were real -- and that while Aslan is presumably stronger than they are (since he can override whatever protection Tash may have given Rabadash), they're still all the same type of being.
MN continues to increase Aslan's power -- he is now the creator-god of the Narnian world -- but given that the pool was already present in the Wood Between the Worlds, and there was bare earth to stand on and air to breathe, my assumption was that somebody or something (maybe the Emperor-Beyond-the-Sea, maybe natural laws working according to blind chance) had already created the world, and Aslan simply moved in and decided to wake it up and decorate it. Also, while he is shown as present in Narnia and in his own country (which apparently has connections to all worlds), he is neither shown nor described as ever having been present in Charn, and I took that as evidence that he is not all-powerful nor omnipresent. (In a related point, and I realize this may not agree with your beliefs or with Lewis's, my general impression of the Christian God and the risen Christ were always of disembodied spiritual forces -- at least in the way they touched the world after Jesus ascended to heaven -- and Aslan always seemed physically present, which made it even less likely for me to connect him to Jesus.)