The paganism of Narnia

By Peter T. Chattaway

THE CHRONICLES of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe comes to movie theatres December 9, and when it does, many Christians will be watching it eagerly to see if director Andrew Adamson (or "son of Adam!") has respected the story's Christian elements.

Some of us, however, will be watching just as closely to see if the film has preserved those bits in C.S. Lewis's book that are a little more, shall we say, pagan. Presumably, the centaurs and fauns will look more or less like the mythological creatures depicted in ancient Greco-Roman art. But will, say, Mr Tumnus regale Lucy with stories of how the Roman god Bacchus filled the streams with wine when he feasted with the forest people?

Many Christians, including those who hope to use this film as an evangelistic tool, tend to excuse the pagan elements in Lewis's books as just so much window dressing; as far as they are concerned, all that stuff is the fairy-tale bait he had to set to lure unbelievers into his Christian world. But there is much more to Lewis's use of pagan myth than that.

In all of his writings, Lewis was confronting a modern, skeptical, materialistic view of the world that had no room for the supernatural. Lewis believed that paganism and Christianity had more in common with each other on this point than either had with the modern, secularized world. In the essay 'Is Theism Important?', he wrote:

"When grave persons express their fear that England is relapsing into Paganism, I am tempted to reply, 'Would that she were.' For I do not think it at all likely that we shall ever see Parliament opened by the slaughtering of a garlanded white bull in the House of Lords or Cabinet Ministers leaving sandwiches in Hyde Park as an offering for the Dryads.

"If such a state of affairs came about, then the Christian apologist would have something to work on. For a Pagan, as history shows, is a man eminently convertible to Christianity. He is essentially the pre-Christian, or sub-Christian, religious man. The post-Christian man of our day differs from him as much as a divorcee differs from a virgin."

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