Adam Gopnik – a writer I rather like – writes a nice piece about CS Lewis, wherein he also demonstrates why non-Christians should think twice before attempting to write seriously about Christianity or historical Christians:
The most explicitly religious part of his myth is the most strenuously, and the least successfully, allegorized. Aslan the lion, the Christ symbol, who has exasperated generations of freethinking parents and delighted generations of worried Anglicans, is, after all, a very weird symbol for that famous carpenter’s son—not just an un-Christian but in many ways an anti-Christian figure….
Yet a central point of the Gospel story is that Jesus is not the lion of the faith but the lamb of God, while his other symbolic animal is, specifically, the lowly and bedraggled donkey. The moral force of the Christian story is that the lions are all on the other side. If we had, say, a donkey, a seemingly uninspiring animal from an obscure corner of Narnia, raised as an uncouth and low-caste beast of burden, rallying the mice and rats and weasels and vultures and all the other unclean animals, and then being killed by the lions in as humiliating a manner as possible—a donkey who reëmerges, to the shock even of his disciples and devotees, as the king of all creation—now, that would be a Christian allegory. A powerful lion, starting life at the top of the food chain, adored by all his subjects and filled with temporal power, killed by a despised evil witch for his power and then reborn to rule, is a Mithraic, not a Christian, myth.
This is, quite simply, a howler. Jesus Christ is the sacrificial Lamb, to be sure, but he is also the Lion of the tribe of Judah. Revelations 5:5: The Scroll and the Lamb: Then one of the elders said to me, “Do not weep! See, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, has triumphed. He is able to open the scroll and its seven seals.”
6Then I saw a Lamb, looking as if it had been slain, standing in the center of the throne, encircled by the four living creatures and the elders. He had seven horns and seven eyes, which are the seven spirits[a] of God sent out into all the earth. 7He came and took the scroll from the right hand of him who sat on the throne. 8And when he had taken it, the four living creatures and the twenty-four elders fell down before the Lamb. Each one had a harp and they were holding golden bowls full of incense, which are the prayers of the saints. 9And they sang a new song:
“You are worthy to take the scroll
and to open its seals,
because you were slain,
and with your blood you purchased men for God
from every tribe and language and people and nation.
10You have made them to be a kingdom and priests to serve our God,
and they will reign on the earth.”
In short, the Lion is the Lamb. It is staggering that Gopnik should have missed this, much less tried to use it as grounds for a religious criticism of the Aslan analogy. The beauty of Jesus Christ’s crucifixion is that he was the Lion throughout, his sacrifice was entirely voluntary. “Do you think I cannot call on my Father, and he will at once put at my disposal more than twelve legions of angels?”
But unfortunately, it’s clear that for all his true appreciation for creative greatness Gopnik is, like most secular writers, simply clueless on matters spiritual. He goes on to compound his error in the very next paragraph:
Though Tolkien was certainly a devout Catholic, there is no way in which “The Lord of the Rings” is a Christian book, much less a Catholic allegory.
Well, except for the “Servant of the Secret Fire” bit, the transformation of Gandalf the Grey into Gandalf the White, the basic theme of the Return of the King, and then, this small quote from Tolkein himself describing the Lord of the Rings as “a fundamentally religious and Catholic work.”
That’s simply embarrassing. And it detracts greatly from an article that otherwise appears to be surprisingly well-informed. I was particularly pleased to note how he credited George MacDonald, the first fantasy great who is all but unknown outside of Christian circles these days.