So when Lewis’s child readers don’t see Christianity in the Chronicles, they are in fact perceiving a truth about Narnia that adults usually miss. The Christianity in Narnia has been substantially, rather than just superficially, transformed — to the point of being much less Christian, perhaps, than Lewis intended. In his essay “On Stories,” Lewis describes a conversation he once had with “an intelligent American pupil,” who remembered being thrilled by a scene in a Fenimore Cooper story in which the sleeping hero is stalked by an Indian brave. To Lewis’s surprise, the student remarked that he would have been just as excited if the villain were “a crook with a revolver,” sneaking up on a twentieth-century version of Natty Bumppo. Not so Lewis: “Take away the feathers, the high cheek-bones, the whiskered trousers, substitute a pistol for a tomahawk, and what would be left? For I wanted not the momentary suspense but that whole world to which it belonged — the snow and the snow-shoes, beavers and canoes, war-paths and wigwams, and Hiawatha names.” Without those trappings, it was not the same story at all.
It would never have occurred to me to liken Narnia to the Roman Catholicism in which I was raised. They were as different as cheese and chalk. And despite Lewis’s own lifelong uneasiness with Catholicism, his High Church Anglicanism was not so very different from it, a fact which struck me when I stood in the chapel at Magdalen College in Oxford, a place where Lewis prayed almost every day after his conversion in 1931. In that room, I felt almost materially transported back to the church where I took my first Communion. My church called its weekly classes “catechism,” instead of “Sunday School,” and we attended it on Tuesdays, but we had the very same stained-glass windows and candles flickering in little wells of red and blue glass.
Ours was a mild form of Catholicism — so mild, in fact, that you could say it was almost Anglican. These were the years during and just after Vatican II; if I dig deeply enough, I have very dim memories of hearing Mass conducted in Latin. When I was still small, however, we switched to a progressively minded parish more in line with the leanings of my Kennedy Democrat parents. In our new church, Sacred Heart, youthful nuns played guitars during folk mass and no one talked about martyred saints. No crucifixes hung on our walls at home and I barely knew who the pope was. I knew the name of our parish priest (all I can remember about him now is that he had a glass eye), but we didn’t socialize with him and he certainly never came to our house. The first time I encountered a truly gruesome image of the bloodied, tortured Christ was at the local art museum, where a Spanish painting of Jesus with rolling eyes, crown of thorns, and gore dripping down his face so terrified me I was afraid to venture back into the building for years. (Even today I experience a twinge of dread whenever I pass it.)
Nevertheless, I was raised in the Catholic Church and confirmed in the faith at the age of thirteen. In catechism classes we learned about sin, about obedience to authority, and about the necessity of the sacraments to the salvation of our eternal souls. My family’s strain of vaguely Scottish Catholicism put a particular emphasis on self-denial. I can remember a conversation with my grandmother before church about the possibility of my putting part of my allowance into the collection plate; it wouldn’t really count, she informed me, unless I gave all of it. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be a sacrifice. Most of the things required of me by my religion — church attendance and participation in other dull ceremonies, fasting before taking Communion, giving up various pleasures for Lent — persuaded me that unhappiness was next to godliness and that virtue was consolidated by suffering.
Traditionally, the Catholic Church doesn’t encourage independent study of the Bible, but we did read the New Testament in catechism. (The Old Testament I wouldn’t read until I got to college.) Children believe what adults tell them as a matter of course, and so I suppose I considered the stories in the Gospels to be “true.” But did I ever really believe in the Christian God? When I consider the profound, passionate faith of Lewis and other real Christians, I can’t honestly say that I did. Certainly, I never believed in Christianity as fully as I believed in Narnia, and this was largely because Christianity as I knew it offered such a drab, grinding, joyless view of life. Perhaps this was a failing of my teachers, but I saw our religion primarily as a body of onerous rules and red tape, like a secular code of law, or interstate commerce regulations. And so, with the determination of a corporate tax attorney, I set about discovering how those rules could be gotten around.
At first, I searched for loopholes, but the Catholic Church had had almost two thousand years to anticipate this very tactic, and my eight-year-old’s ingenuity was overmatched. I was impressed to learn that the Church had already worked out a policy on sins that were interrupted by forces beyond the sinner’s control (guilty!). Doctrine, surprisingly enough, turned out to be much more vulnerable to full-frontal attacks on its moral legitimacy. The fate allotted to newborn babies and other blameless people who die without the chance to be baptized turned out to be the ideal test case for my personal campaign to invalidate the authority of the Church. Why, I demanded of the nun teaching our catechism class, should innocents be condemned to Limbo simply because of an accident of birth or misfortune?
On the day we discussed the exclusion of unbaptized babies from heaven, I was only one among several children who protested. The nun replied with a boilerplate defense of the sacraments; these were the rituals that God required, administered by the one true Church, for the eternal salvation of our souls. But, we replied, he was God, wasn’t he, and if he couldn’t be expected to make exceptions to his own laws, couldn’t he have come up with a system that wasn’t so manifestly unfair?
There was a whiff of desperate improvisation in the whole idea of Limbo, I remember thinking. It had so obviously been cooked up as an afterthought because someone hadn’t properly worked through the baptism rule. Limbo was a quick and dirty fix, and if God really were responsible for this mess, he could hardly be as wise or as loving as the Church made him out to be. On the other hand, if (as seemed likely) it was really human beings who’d come up with the sacrament system, then who was to say that human beings hadn’t invented all of Catholic doctrine?
Skepticism, like faith, is more a matter of temperament than indoctrination. Any one of a half-dozen serious flaws in any theological worldview can undermine the beliefs of someone who doesn’t much want to believe in the first place. (One man I know says his moment of disillusionment came when he looked at a map depicting the distribution of all the world’s religions and realized that which one you belonged to depends more on where you were born than on the irresistibility of divine revelation.) On the day we discussed Limbo in catechism, I was already looking for an out. The sacrifice of Jesus had not impressed me as especially meaningful or moving. The tedium of Sunday Mass had not become any more endurable with age and an English liturgy. I hated church. I bridled at the ritual of confession and was suspicious of the idea of original sin. Above all, I was bored by all the stories of men in beards and sandals endlessly gabbing on about mustard seeds, fishes, and vineyards.