“This is very high up,” she informed me, pointing at the whale.
“It is?” I replied.
“It’s very, very high,” she explained patiently. “Sadie really likes it.”
Sadie is her babysitter, and like many people caring for little children in Manhattan, she has only a few places to take Corinne and her brother on rainy days. One of those places is the American Museum of Natural History on West 79th Street, and in the vast Milstein Hall of Ocean Life, where toddlers are allowed to run around loose, there is a life-size model of a blue whale hanging from the ceiling. When I looked at the picture in the book, I thought “blue whale,” summoning up a generalization, a typical blue whale distilled from everything I know about the creatures, including the fact that they live in the ocean, which is “down.” When Corinne looked at the picture she had one memory to call upon, the only representation of a blue whale that she had ever seen before. She thought not of blue whales in general, but of one whale in particular. And that whale is very high up.
Corinne and I were both correct; we simply read the image in the book differently. I saw a reference to a concept, and she saw a depiction of a familiar thing. Soon, as she gathers more data, Corinne will learn to look at the museum’s whale model and see it as a representation of an animal that lives down in the sea, even if this particular representation is suspended from the ceiling in a room full of dioramas. She’ll recognize that the high-up-ness of the model is an irrelevant (if cool) detail, while its color and size are telling her something meaningful about the animal it stands for. Eventually, though not for many years, she’ll learn to apply the same sort of understanding to more sophisticated artifacts, like stories.
To someone who has heard and read many stories about the self-sacrifice of god-kings or other saintly heroes who suffer for the salvation of others, Aslan is obviously an analog of Christ. But to someone who is still encountering instances of the great themes of Western culture for the first time, Aslan cannot be Jesus because Jesus is a bearded man in sandals and robe, while Aslan is a lion. We shouldn’t, however, mistake the less-experienced reader’s interpretation as simply wrong; Corinne’s whale was in fact very high up, and Jesus was a bearded man in sandals. If not being able to see the forest for the trees is one kind of blindness, so is not being able to see the trees for the forest. When Corinne was even younger, sitting in her stroller in a parking lot, she began to repeat the word “bubbles” to her mystified parents. Nowhere around them could they see any bubbles, and besides, the baby was pointing to a car. Then they noticed that it had rained while they were inside the store, and that the drops of rainwater that beaded up on the smooth surfaces of the car looked just like bubbles. Once we learn to see things with the idea that they belong to a particular category, we’re in danger of missing all the qualities they share with things in other categories, not to mention all the qualities that are theirs alone. What’s in front of our noses can become invisible to us if we can’t fit it into one of the frameworks we have set up for understanding the world and ourselves. Sometimes the “irrelevant” facts we screen out are poetic as well as physical (like the similarity between drops of rainwater and bubbles) and occasionally they’re crucial. There’s an Agatha Christie novel, Hercule Poirot’s Christmas, in which the solution hinges on the fact that what several characters have described as a “bit of red rubber” is actually two different things; the murderer has substituted an innocuous rubber object for the deflated balloon that was evidence of his crime. Both ways of thinking — the generalized and the concrete, the deep and the broad — can be powerful, and both are limited. If we want to understand the world around us more completely, we need to keep both methods in play.
All this is by way of saying that the child readers of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe who do not recognize its parallels to the biblical story of the Crucifixion and the Resurrection are not necessarily mistaken. Our particular, immediate experience of something is as true as the conclusions we reach after we have sorted all the details, figured out which ones match a pattern we’ve observed before, and discarded the rest. To me, the fact that Aslan was a real, material, warm, and furry lion was as important as the fact that he died and was brought back to life. It was even more important, really, since death wasn’t especially interesting to me, and animals were.
In his youth, Lewis lost what faith he had had as a small boy. Explaining this estrangement in later years, he wrote, “The externals of Christianity made no appeal to my sense of beauty. Oriental imagery and style largely repelled me; and for the rest, Christianity was mainly associated for me with ugly architecture, ugly music, and bad poetry.” When, as an adult, he decided to embed a Christian message in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, his plan was to strip the theme of Christianity’s unattractive “externals,” its “stained-glass and Sunday School associations,” in hope that his young readers would then perceive these themes “in their real potency.”
Lewis didn’t intend his audience to recognize what he was doing, or at least not right away. In an essay titled “Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What’s to Be Said,” he described this plan as an attempt to elude the defenses readers set up against authors and stories that aim to teach them something for their own good. He wanted, as he memorably phrased it, to “steal past those watchful dragons.”
Yet it’s worth asking whether the stained-glass and Sunday school associations aren’t as much a part of Christianity as the mystical Resurrection of Christ, even if they aren’t supposed to be as important a part. Is a religion a great story about the meaning of life or a daily practice, or is it perhaps something else — a collection of icons? Although, doctrinally speaking, accepting Jesus Christ as one’s lord and savior is the key act of Christian conversion, many Christians seem to believe that going to church and abiding by a list of detailed restrictions are just as important.
For Lewis’s friend J. R. R. Tolkien, a Roman Catholic, such practices as taking Communion and making confession were as central to his religion as its core metaphysical beliefs, if not more so. Lewis participated in similar rites, but primarily regarded his faith as an object of contemplation and analysis. Religions are forever being pulled in one direction or the other. Islam was originally intended to be a streamlined faith, asking only five simple, practical duties from believers: acknowledgment of Allah as God, prayer five times daily, charity, pilgrimage to Mecca, and fasting through Ramadan — the “five pillars of Islam.” Over time, this minimalist architecture was embellished. Visionaries and clerics developed variations, such as the mystical philosophical tradition of Sufism or those elaborate lists of rules about veils, dancing, and kite flying, rules that some believers now consider essential enough to kill or die for.
In her book The Battle for God, the scholar Karen Armstrong writes of the indivisibility of belief and rite in ancient religions: “Myth only became a reality when it was embodied in cult, rituals, and ceremonies, which worked aesthetically upon worshipers, evoking within them a sense of sacred significance and enabling them to apprehend the deeper currents of existence.” The sacrament of the Eucharist is one such rite. Holy Communion allows worshippers to act out and mystically embody the story of Jesus feeding transubstantiated bread and wine to his followers. The ritual is essential; religion is as much something you do as something you believe. It’s also something you paint and carve; the “externals” of a faith include everything from the bowls of holy water and statues in a church to the hymns sung and the devotional art and shrines that believers keep in their homes. How can these be separated from the “real potency” of a faith’s myths, any more than the ritual service of bread and wine to communicants can be separated from the metaphysical import of the Last Supper?