The only Christian reference I noticed in the first four or five years after I read the books is in LB, when Lucy talks about a stable on earth once holding something bigger than the entire world. I noticed that because it jumped out at me as not being organic to the story -- it's Lucy comparing something in Narnia to something on earth, instead of people just describing things in Narnia. I remember my reaction to that line was something along the lines of, "Something inside a stable bigger than the entire world? But that doesn't make any sense... no, wait, it's a metaphor; she's talking about Jesus. Okay. So she's read a Bible at some point since we last saw her. But what does that have to do with the price of tea in China?" because I had never equated Aslan to Jesus and so I couldn't see the point of including an explicit Christian reference in a story about an imaginary world and a lion-god.
So as you see, I interpreted Aslan as a pagan lion-god, the son of another pagan god (the Emperor-Beyond-the-Sea, who is, incidentally, also implied to have a physical body -- he has a scepter, in any case, which would generally require hands or paws to hold), the ruler of a pantheon of lesser deities in Narnia, and the opponent of at least some members of a rival pantheon in Calormen. His home is in a world that touches all other worlds, or at least an awful lot of them, and the implication is that either he creates areas within his world that are like other worlds but somehow richer, or that he decorates other worlds so they resemble parts of his own world. He is powerful and wise, and gentle and dangerous, but I did not get a sense that he was all-powerful -- otherwise why would he defer to the Emperor-Beyond-the-Sea? And there is never any implication that Aslan and the Emperor are one and the same, the way the doctrine of the Trinity claims that Jesus and God are one and the same; if that claim had been made, I think I might have noticed Lewis's Christian parallels on my own, since I had not run into that particular theological idea in any other religion.
While I was given a children's book of Bible stories to read when I was very young, my parents also gave me a book of Greek myths, a book of Norse myths, an awful lot of fairy-tale collections... and treated them all as collections of interesting fictional stories that I ought to know for general cultural literacy. So while I did have Christian stories and some Christian symbolism in my mental library, I had a lot of other religions and magics floating around as well. And to me, pagan religions seemed to fit Narnia more naturally than Christianity, particularly since, for me, Christianity is so dependent on a particular series of events in a particular time and place. It's hard for me to mentally transfer that religion to a different setting without directly transferring those stories, but it's easy to transfer the general idea of polytheism, because polytheism is just a general notion of 'many gods' and those gods are organic to their own settings, as Aslan is organic to Narnia, but Jesus would be a foreign imposition.
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REALLY long comment, part 2
Date: 2009-05-07 02:09 am (UTC)So as you see, I interpreted Aslan as a pagan lion-god, the son of another pagan god (the Emperor-Beyond-the-Sea, who is, incidentally, also implied to have a physical body -- he has a scepter, in any case, which would generally require hands or paws to hold), the ruler of a pantheon of lesser deities in Narnia, and the opponent of at least some members of a rival pantheon in Calormen. His home is in a world that touches all other worlds, or at least an awful lot of them, and the implication is that either he creates areas within his world that are like other worlds but somehow richer, or that he decorates other worlds so they resemble parts of his own world. He is powerful and wise, and gentle and dangerous, but I did not get a sense that he was all-powerful -- otherwise why would he defer to the Emperor-Beyond-the-Sea? And there is never any implication that Aslan and the Emperor are one and the same, the way the doctrine of the Trinity claims that Jesus and God are one and the same; if that claim had been made, I think I might have noticed Lewis's Christian parallels on my own, since I had not run into that particular theological idea in any other religion.
While I was given a children's book of Bible stories to read when I was very young, my parents also gave me a book of Greek myths, a book of Norse myths, an awful lot of fairy-tale collections... and treated them all as collections of interesting fictional stories that I ought to know for general cultural literacy. So while I did have Christian stories and some Christian symbolism in my mental library, I had a lot of other religions and magics floating around as well. And to me, pagan religions seemed to fit Narnia more naturally than Christianity, particularly since, for me, Christianity is so dependent on a particular series of events in a particular time and place. It's hard for me to mentally transfer that religion to a different setting without directly transferring those stories, but it's easy to transfer the general idea of polytheism, because polytheism is just a general notion of 'many gods' and those gods are organic to their own settings, as Aslan is organic to Narnia, but Jesus would be a foreign imposition.
So that's one thing.