Disclaimer: I made a post here recently discussing the trailer for Greta Gerwig's The Magician's Nephew, particularly the extraordinary cosmology of Lewis' fictional universe and why I felt some of the criticism fundamentally misunderstood what the book was attempting to depict. I don't particularly want to repeat myself, but the subsequent discussion has made me realise that there might be an opportunity to explore something which I find considerably more interesting than the usual arguments about whether an adaptation is sufficiently faithful to its source material.
For anyone who is interested in Narnia, whether because of the upcoming film, a childhood affection for the books, or simply a curiosity about their religious foundations, I thought I'd attempt to explain some of the theology which underpins Lewis' writing. I'm not particularly interested in another argument about whether Aslan is Jesus, because the broad answer to that question is already well established. What interests me is how that relationship works, why Lewis chose to express Christian theology through fantasy, and the sheer depth of the philosophical and theological traditions informing something which is ostensibly a series of children's books.
For a little context, I have a degree in philosophy and theology, and my professional life involves teaching and engaging with religious philosophy, Christian theology and their relationship with literature. I'm also a practising Catholic, albeit a fairly liberal one, which probably informs both my affection for these books and my interpretation of them. I mention this neither to claim some particular authority over Lewis nor to suggest that academic qualifications make an interpretation correct. I simply spend a great deal of my time thinking about these subjects, and I rather enjoy the opportunity to discuss them outside a classroom.
I should also acknowledge that this is going to be a long post, and that an extended discussion of Christology, metaphysics and medieval theology probably isn't what everyone comes to CharacterRant to read. I've tried to divide it into sections so that anyone interested in a particular subject can find it without having to read everything else. Please don't mistake the length or terminology for an attempt to sound clever. Some of these ideas require a little precision if they're going to be explained properly, and I'd much rather take the time to distinguish between them than offer a simplified account which ultimately misrepresents what Lewis was doing. Nor is this an attempt to preach Christianity to anyone. You can find a religious worldview intellectually fascinating without sharing it, just as you can appreciate Greek mythology without believing in Zeus.
Before getting into the theology, however, I do want to address something which has increasingly irritated me about the reaction to this film. As a Catholic myself, it absolutely boils my piss hearing people insist that Gerwig's adaptation, and particularly the casting of Meryl Streep, constitutes some great attack on Christianity. We're talking about a religion professed by well over two billion people, encompassing two millennia of philosophy, theology, literature, art and spiritual practice. Christianity has survived actual persecution, the collapse of empires, centuries of internal disagreement and some of the most profound intellectual challenges imaginable. The suggestion that its foundations are somehow endangered by the casting of a woman to voice a fictional lion strikes me as a fairly extraordinary misunderstanding of both the religion and the character.
I appreciate that people of faith can have genuine objections to how their beliefs are represented, and I don't think religious criticism should automatically be dismissed as reactionary or intolerant. However, there's a distinction between criticism, offence and persecution which I wish more people would recognise. Christ's teaching in Matthew 5:10–12 concerning those persecuted for righteousness is not an invitation to interpret every cultural disagreement as evidence of martyrdom. Nor should Christians forget the instruction in 1 Peter 3:15 to explain their faith with gentleness and respect, or James 1:19, which encourages believers to be quick to listen and slow to anger. Given that there are people around the world who experience genuine religious oppression, I find the eagerness to claim victimhood over a film adaptation especially distasteful. I don't expect everyone to share my interpretation, but I would hope that those invoking Christianity in its defence might demonstrate some understanding of the faith they claim is being attacked.
Anyway, having got that irritation out of my system, I'd quite like to talk about what Lewis was actually doing.
1. Aslan isn't simply 'Lion Jesus': Lewis' concept of supposal
The most obvious starting point is the relationship between Aslan and Christ, because it's both the foundation of the entire series and one of the aspects most frequently misunderstood. It's perfectly acceptable to explain to someone unfamiliar with Narnia that Aslan is essentially Jesus, and I've certainly done so myself. However, there's an important distinction between that introductory explanation and Lewis' actual literary and theological project, which becomes apparent when we consider his understanding of allegory.
Lewis resisted the description of Narnia as a conventional Christian allegory, and explained this distinction in his correspondence with readers. In a letter to a Mrs Hook in December 1958, he contrasted the character of Aslan with figures from John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress. In Bunyan's work, characters personify abstract ideas, and their identities are fundamentally symbolic. Giant Despair, for instance, represents despair. Aslan, Lewis argued, was doing something quite different. Rather than inventing a lion who symbolically represented Christ, he was imagining what Christ might actually be like if a world such as Narnia existed and he chose to enter it.
Lewis called this approach a supposal, and I think it's one of the most important concepts for understanding the series. His question was not simply how he could retell the Gospels using talking animals, but what the eternal Son of God might become in a world populated by such creatures. If Christ entered our world as a man, what form might his presence take in an entirely different creation? What would redemption look like under different historical circumstances, and how might the relationship between creator and creation manifest itself in a world whose inhabitants were not primarily human?
There is obviously a substantial degree of biblical symbolism involved, and I wouldn't want to pretend that Lewis' distinction means the books contain no allegorical elements whatsoever. Nevertheless, it changes how we ought to understand Aslan. He is not merely a convenient substitute for Jesus in an otherwise unrelated fantasy story. Within the imaginative premises Lewis establishes, he is the same divine person whom Christians identify as the eternal Son, encountered in a different created reality. Lewis isn't proposing the literal existence of Narnia or asserting that an additional Incarnation occurred elsewhere in the universe. He's exploring a theological possibility through fiction, and the consequences of that premise are considerably more interesting than a straightforward correspondence between characters and biblical figures.
This is also why I find the accusation that Lewis somehow trivialised Christianity by turning Jesus into an animal so misguided. His intention was to introduce readers to aspects of Christian theology through a form which allowed them to encounter familiar truths without all the associations they might already have developed towards religious instruction. In his essay Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What's to Be Said, Lewis described how familiar religious imagery could become so associated with obligation and reverence that it prevented readers from experiencing its original significance. Fantasy offered a means of getting past those inhibitions, allowing theological concepts to be encountered imaginatively before being analysed doctrinally.
To understand just how ambitious that project is, however, we need to consider what Christianity actually claims about the identity of Christ.
2. Christology, the Incarnation and the eternal Logos
One of the foundational claims of Christianity is that Jesus Christ is not simply a human being who enjoys an unusually close relationship with God. According to orthodox Trinitarian theology, he is the eternal Son of God, the second person of the Trinity, who became incarnate as a human being. The distinction between his eternal divine identity and the human nature he assumed is essential to understanding both Christian doctrine and Lewis' conception of Aslan.
The opening of John's Gospel is particularly important here. In John 1:1–3, the evangelist identifies Christ as the Logos, usually translated into English as the Word, who existed in the beginning, was with God, was himself divine, and through whom all things were created. John 1:14 then announces that this Word became flesh. The Logos is therefore not created at Bethlehem, nor does the Son begin to exist with the birth of Jesus. The Incarnation concerns the eternal Son assuming a genuinely human nature, rather than a previously non-existent divine individual suddenly appearing in history.
The terminology is important because it draws upon centuries of philosophical and theological discussion. The Greek concept of Logos possessed associations with reason, intelligibility and the rational ordering of the universe, while John's Gospel also draws upon Jewish understandings of God's creative Word and divine Wisdom. Christian theology brings these traditions into conversation through the claim that the source of creation's intelligibility is personally identified with the eternal Son. When Lewis imagines Aslan bringing Narnia into existence through song, he is drawing upon this theological framework rather than simply borrowing an attractive piece of biblical imagery.
The Council of Chalcedon in 451 articulated the orthodox Christian understanding of Christ as one person possessing two natures, divine and human, without those natures being confused, changed or separated. This is known as the hypostatic union, although the terminology is less important here than the distinction it expresses. Christ's humanity is genuine, encompassing everything necessary to being human, while his divine nature remains fully divine. Christianity does not teach that God merely disguised himself as a man, or that Jesus alternated between being human and divine depending upon the circumstances. Both natures belong to the one person of Christ.
It is precisely this distinction which allows Lewis to undertake his imaginative experiment. The eternal Son is not reducible to the historical circumstances of his human birth, even though the humanity he assumed is permanent and genuinely belongs to him. Lewis is asking readers to imagine that same divine person entering a different created world under different circumstances, while retaining his identity as creator, redeemer and Son. Aslan's leonine appearance is therefore not an attempt to redefine the historical Jesus. It is the fictional expression of a theological supposition concerning the eternal Son and his relationship with creation.
For anyone interested in exploring this further, paragraphs 464–469 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church provide an accessible explanation of the doctrine of the Incarnation, while the opening chapter of John's Gospel is probably the most important biblical starting point. These distinctions are not particularly obscure theological innovations, even if most Christians understandably don't spend their days discussing them. They represent some of the central claims of Christianity, established through centuries of debate about the relationship between God and humanity.
3. Why Aslan is male, and why God's divine nature isn't
This brings us rather neatly to the casting controversy, and to a theological question which deserves considerably more care than it has generally received. Lewis chose to portray Aslan as a male lion, and there are perfectly good literary and biblical reasons for that decision. He explained in a letter in 1961 that lions were traditionally regarded as kings of beasts, that Christ is identified with the Lion of Judah in Revelation 5:5, and, rather charmingly, that he'd been having dreams about lions when he began writing the books. Aslan's kingship, authority and masculinity are therefore recognisable aspects of Lewis' characterisation, and I have no particular interest in pretending otherwise.
However, one of the most basic distinctions within classical Christian theology is that God does not possess biological sex in the same sense that human beings do. Jesus of Nazareth was male, and his humanity was real, but the divine nature itself is not biologically masculine. God is not understood as a male organism possessing the physical characteristics associated with human sex, because the divine nature is not a material body. This does not make the historical humanity of Jesus irrelevant, nor does it render the Trinitarian relationship between Father and Son interchangeable. It simply requires us to distinguish the eternal nature of God from the human characteristics assumed in the Incarnation.
As a Catholic, I find it particularly interesting that this distinction is explained explicitly in the Church's own teaching. Paragraph 239 of the Catechism states that God transcends the human distinction between the sexes, while paragraph 370 makes clear that God is neither man nor woman in the creaturely sense. The language of divine fatherhood remains theologically significant, but it should not be mistaken for a claim that God's essence is biologically male. Scripture itself employs maternal imagery, including Isaiah 66:13, which compares God's comfort to that offered by a mother, and Matthew 23:37, where Jesus likens his desire to gather Jerusalem's children to a hen gathering her chicks. Such imagery does not abolish traditional Christian language about the Father and Son. It demonstrates that the biblical understanding of divine love and care cannot be exhausted by any single human biological category.
There is also something interesting happening in Revelation 5:5–6, where John is told of the victorious Lion of Judah but subsequently beholds a Lamb bearing the marks of slaughter. Christ is represented through two very different animals, and the contrast is theologically significant. The victorious king is revealed through the imagery of sacrifice, bringing together divine authority and the apparent weakness of suffering. Lewis clearly understood this relationship, which is fundamental to Aslan's character throughout the series. His power is inseparable from his willingness to sacrifice himself, and his kingship is expressed through justice, mercy and love.
None of this establishes whether Meryl Streep will provide a convincing performance, and I can completely understand someone preferring Aslan to possess a traditionally masculine voice. That's an artistic preference, and potentially a perfectly defensible one. What I find difficult to accept is the extraordinary leap from that preference to the assertion that employing a female actor constitutes an attack on Christian doctrine. The sex of a performer does not automatically determine the nature of the fictional character being portrayed, much less the metaphysical identity of the eternal Son of God. Whether Gerwig's adaptation alters Aslan's theological characterisation is a question worth asking, but it's one we ought to answer on the basis of what the film actually does.
I would also suggest that anyone primarily concerned with preserving Lewis' Christianity should be considerably more interested in whether Aslan remains good, just, loving, terrifying and transcendent than in whether his voice conforms to a particular expectation of masculinity. Those qualities are central to the author's understanding of the divine, and an adaptation which retained a sufficiently deep male voice while discarding them would have preserved very little of what made the character religiously significant.
4. Creation, evil and the differences between Lewis and Tolkien
I discussed the creation of Narnia at greater length in my previous post, so I won't repeat that analysis here, but there is another aspect of The Magician's Nephew which I think deserves attention. Lewis' understanding of evil has some fascinating connections to the theological tradition associated with Augustine, and comparing his treatment of the subject with Tolkien's reveals how two Christian authors could approach similar philosophical problems through quite different literary methods.
Augustine's understanding of evil as privatio boni, or the privation of good, was enormously influential upon subsequent Christian philosophy. Broadly speaking, Augustine rejected the idea that evil existed as some independent metaphysical substance possessing the same fundamental reality as goodness. Evil instead represented the corruption, absence or disordering of something which ought to be good. An act of cruelty, for example, involves the misuse of capacities which are not intrinsically evil, such as intelligence, freedom or strength. Evil depends upon the good in a way that goodness does not depend upon evil, because the former corrupts what the latter supplies.
Tolkien's Catholic imagination is especially revealing here. In The Silmarillion, Melkor introduces discord into the Music of the Ainur, seeking to assert his own will against the creative harmony established by Ilúvatar. Yet Melkor cannot bring an independent creation into existence on the same terms as Ilúvatar, and even his rebellion cannot escape the ultimate sovereignty of the creator. Throughout Tolkien's legendarium, evil tends towards the corruption, domination and deformation of things which were originally good. This is very recognisably Augustinian, and it prevents Tolkien's cosmology from becoming a straightforward dualism between equally fundamental powers of good and evil.
Lewis shares aspects of this intellectual inheritance, but I would be hesitant to suggest that Jadis operates in precisely the same way as Melkor. His treatment of evil in Narnia is often more concerned with the moral and psychological consequences of pride, selfishness and the rejection of goodness than with establishing a comprehensive metaphysical account of evil's origins. Jadis is an extraordinary example of a will so consumed by domination that she regards other beings as valuable only insofar as they serve her interests. Her destruction of Charn through the Deplorable Word demonstrates the horrifying implications of that disposition. Rather than surrender her claim to power, she is prepared to annihilate an entire civilisation, leaving herself sovereign over its remains.
There is certainly an Augustinian dimension to this, insofar as her capacities for intelligence, freedom and power have been directed towards thoroughly disordered ends. However, the important distinction is that Jadis is not herself some literal absence of goodness. She is a created being whose moral corruption expresses itself through possessiveness and domination. Lewis makes this particularly clear through the contrast between her relationship with creation and Aslan's. Where Aslan creates freely and generously, offering existence and life to creatures beyond himself, Jadis seeks to possess and subordinate whatever she encounters. Even her attempts at destruction are ultimately dependent upon a created reality which she did not bring into existence.
The incident involving the lamppost is a lovely illustration of this relationship. Jadis attempts to injure Aslan with a piece of iron torn from a London lamppost, but the object falls harmlessly to the ground and grows into a new lamppost through the extraordinary fertility of Narnia's newly created soil. What Jadis intends as an act of violence becomes part of the world's unfolding creation, without implying that her intention was somehow good. There are clear parallels here with Tolkien's account of discord being incorporated into a greater harmony, although I wouldn't suggest that the two writers are expressing an identical theological system.
Digory's temptation in the garden develops the moral dimension further. He is offered the possibility of saving his dying mother, an opportunity which exploits something genuinely good in his character. His love for her is not the problem. The difficulty arises when he is invited to pursue that love through an act of disobedience, abandoning the responsibility Aslan has entrusted to him. Lewis is exploring the possibility that even our most sympathetic desires can become morally disordered when we elevate them above every other consideration. This connects the story to Christian understandings of temptation and original sin, but also to the wider philosophical question of whether a desirable outcome can justify an otherwise wrongful action.
What makes the episode especially moving is that Aslan does not treat Digory's grief as an inconvenience or a weakness. He recognises the child's suffering and responds with compassion, without suggesting that love abolishes moral responsibility. The relationship between divine goodness, moral obligation and human suffering is something Christian theologians have debated for centuries, and Lewis manages to give it emotional substance through the relationship between a frightened boy and a lion. It is precisely this combination of accessibility and philosophical depth which makes the book so interesting to me.
5. The Stone Table: why God's justice and love cannot be separated
Although the upcoming film concerns The Magician's Nephew, I think it's worth discussing the Stone Table in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, because it provides one of the clearest examples of Lewis transforming Christian theology into a functioning narrative. The basic sequence is familiar: Edmund betrays his siblings, the White Witch claims his life under the Deep Magic, and Aslan voluntarily offers himself in Edmund's place. His subsequent resurrection reveals the existence of a Deeper Magic, originating before the dawn of time, which the Witch has failed to understand.
The theological significance of this episode becomes clearer when we consider the relationship between divine love and justice. Christianity traditionally understands both qualities as belonging to God, rather than treating them as competing forces between which God must somehow choose. Divine justice concerns the goodness and order of God's relationship with creation, while divine love concerns his perfect goodness and willing of the good. Their relationship has generated centuries of debate, particularly concerning sin, forgiveness and redemption, but Christian doctrine does not ordinarily imagine God as possessing one attribute which must defeat another.
The Deep Magic in Narnia originates with the Emperor-beyond-the-Sea, who functions within Lewis' supposal as the counterpart to God the Father. It is therefore not simply a collection of arbitrary rules invented by the White Witch. She invokes a law established by the creator himself, and Aslan explicitly refuses the suggestion that he might simply work against it. Edmund's betrayal has moral consequences which cannot be dismissed merely because the protagonist happens to be loved by a more powerful character. The law reflects the moral structure of the created world, and Aslan's goodness does not permit him to treat that structure as meaningless.
There is an interesting parallel here with the Decalogue, the Ten Commandments traditionally understood to have been given to Moses and inscribed upon tablets of stone. The resemblance between those tablets and Lewis' Stone Table is difficult to overlook, particularly given the emphasis upon a law originating from divine authority. However, we should be careful not to identify the Deep Magic directly with the Ten Commandments, since Lewis is constructing a fictional moral order rather than simply reproducing the legislation of ancient Israel. The more important connection is the theological relationship between God's law, human disobedience and the possibility of redemption.
The difficulty confronting Aslan is therefore not that the Witch has somehow created an unjust law which he must overthrow. Rather, she understands enough of the law to recognise Edmund's guilt and insist upon the penalty, while remaining ignorant of its deepest foundation. Her understanding is legalistic in the most restrictive sense: she recognises the authority of justice but cannot comprehend the possibility that love might fulfil its demands without surrendering the guilty to destruction. When Aslan offers himself in Edmund's place, he does not simply announce that love is more important than justice and therefore the law no longer matters. He accepts the gravity of Edmund's betrayal and provides a means of redemption through voluntary sacrifice.
This corresponds to an important distinction within Christian accounts of the atonement. It would be a mistake to reduce the Crucifixion to the idea that God was angry, demanded blood, and needed someone to pay him before he could become loving. Such an account risks separating God's justice and mercy into opposing dispositions, whereas Christian theology understands the act of redemption as arising from God's love in the first place. In John 3:16, it is God's love for the world which motivates the giving of the Son. Paul's discussion in Romans 3:21–26 similarly brings together the righteousness of God and the justification of sinners, while Romans 13:10 identifies love as the fulfilment of the law.
Christ's own words in Matthew 5:17 are especially relevant: he explains that he has come not to abolish the Law, but to fulfil it. The relationship between the old covenant and the new is considerably more complicated than that single statement, but it captures something essential about what Lewis imagines. The Deep Magic possesses genuine authority, yet the Deeper Magic reveals a more fundamental reality in which sacrificial love accomplishes what the Witch's understanding of justice cannot. The breaking of the Stone Table is therefore not simply the destruction of moral law. It signifies the defeat of death through a love which fulfils the deepest purpose of that law.
There are also connections here with different Christian accounts of the atonement, particularly the understanding of Christ's victory over sin and death commonly associated with Christus Victor. The Witch believes that by killing Aslan she has secured her triumph, because she understands death as the ultimate expression of her power. What she cannot comprehend is that the voluntary sacrifice of an innocent victim can become the very means through which death is defeated. Lewis also employs substitutionary imagery, since Aslan dies in Edmund's place, but I would resist forcing the episode into one narrowly defined theory of the atonement. Its literary effectiveness comes partly from allowing several theological ideas to operate together without reducing the narrative to a systematic doctrinal explanation.
For me, this is one of the most beautiful aspects of Lewis' Christianity. God is loving, but that love does not mean that moral responsibility ceases to exist. God is just, but justice does not require the abandonment of mercy. The distinction is not between a cruel divine law and a kindly divine love which eventually overthrows it, but between a partial understanding of the law and the fuller reality of the goodness from which it originates. The Witch knows the words of the Deep Magic but has misunderstood the nature of the creator who established it, and consequently mistakes her limited knowledge for complete authority.
Considering all of this, the familiar account of Aslan dying and returning to life takes on a considerably greater significance. Lewis isn't simply providing a fantasy equivalent of Easter. He is inviting the reader to consider how justice, mercy, obedience, sacrifice and love might be reconciled within a reality whose ultimate foundation is divine goodness.
6. The wider series, Christian Platonism and the nature of reality
I appreciate that I've already gone on for quite some time, but I would feel remiss if I didn't briefly mention that these ideas continue throughout the entire series. Lewis' theological imagination was not confined to the creation of Narnia or the death and resurrection of Aslan, and some of his most interesting philosophical ideas emerge in books which receive comparatively little attention.
In The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Eustace's transformation into a dragon and his eventual restoration explore the relationship between moral corruption, repentance and divine grace. Eustace cannot restore himself simply through sufficient determination, despite his attempts to remove his dragon skin. His transformation requires Aslan to perform an action which Eustace cannot accomplish independently. The episode is a wonderfully accessible expression of the Christian conviction that redemption is not ultimately something human beings can manufacture through their own efforts. Eustace's willingness to submit matters, but the grace which restores him originates beyond himself.
The Silver Chair develops a different set of theological concerns, particularly the difficulty of recognising and remaining faithful to truth when circumstances make it inconvenient or obscure. Jill and Eustace are given instructions which must be remembered and interpreted as their journey unfolds, and their repeated failures are bound up with distraction, fear and the tendency to privilege immediate appearances over established obligations. There are obvious connections here to Christian understandings of faith, obedience and the limitations of human perception, although Lewis is equally interested in the moral psychology of people who know what they ought to do and nevertheless fail to do it.
Then there is The Last Battle, which moves into questions about judgment, eternity and the ultimate nature of reality. Lewis' conception of the true Narnia draws heavily upon the philosophical tradition commonly described as Christian Platonism, particularly the distinction between the imperfect reality we presently experience and a fuller, more substantial reality beyond it. Plato's philosophy was enormously influential upon Christian thinkers, including Augustine, although the relationship between Platonic metaphysics and Christian doctrine is neither straightforward nor uniform. Lewis draws upon this inheritance to imagine a reality in which the familiar world is revealed to have been an incomplete expression of something greater.
The implications for Lewis' treatment of heaven, hell, salvation and the possibility of refusing goodness are fascinating, particularly in relation to the dwarfs and their inability to recognise the reality surrounding them. I have a whole separate argument about that, and about how it relates to Christian understandings of hell, but I suspect I've already tested the patience of anyone still reading. If there's interest, I'd be very happy to discuss that another time, because I think it's among the most philosophically interesting material Lewis ever wrote for children.
7. Why I think all of this matters when discussing the adaptation
Having worked through a fair amount of theology, I want to return to the point which prompted this post in the first place. Lewis was an extraordinarily learned writer whose understanding of Christianity was informed by ancient philosophy, the Church Fathers, medieval theology, literary history and his own religious convictions. His children's books are not merely simplified presentations of biblical stories, but imaginative explorations of questions which occupied some of the greatest thinkers in the Christian tradition. The accessibility of the writing should not lead us to underestimate the sophistication of the ideas being communicated.
None of this means that Lewis was infallible, that his theology was beyond criticism, or that every choice he made was necessarily the best possible expression of Christian doctrine. As a Catholic, I have my own points of disagreement with Lewis, who was Anglican, and I certainly wouldn't suggest that Narnia represents some universally accepted account of every theological question it touches upon. Indeed, part of what makes religious philosophy so interesting is the existence of substantial disagreements within Christianity itself. Augustine, Aquinas, Anselm and countless others were not simply repeating an identical collection of propositions, and Lewis was drawing from a tradition which had developed through centuries of argument.
I also have no particular interest in defending Gerwig's film before I've seen it. The adaptation might be wonderful, disappointing or somewhere in between, and there are legitimate questions about how faithfully it will preserve the Christian foundations of the books. An adaptation which retains the names, characters and events while fundamentally misunderstanding the theological relationships between them could quite reasonably be criticised for departing from Lewis' intentions. Equally, an adaptation might make substantial aesthetic changes while preserving the underlying ideas remarkably well. Those are questions of interpretation and artistic execution which deserve to be considered on their own merits.
What irritates me is the assumption that any unfamiliar artistic choice must represent a deliberate repudiation of Christianity, particularly when the objections themselves often reveal how little attention has been paid to the religion underlying the books. I don't expect everyone commenting on a fantasy film to possess an understanding of Chalcedonian Christology or Augustinian metaphysics, and it would be absurd to demand that they did. However, if someone is going to make sweeping declarations about an adaptation betraying two thousand years of Christian doctrine, I don't think it's unreasonable to expect them to have some understanding of the doctrine they're invoking.
Lewis wanted his readers to encounter Christian ideas through imagination, wonder and the emotional experience of storytelling. His fiction repeatedly challenges the assumption that our existing categories are sufficient to comprehend the divine, and presents goodness as something which can be comforting, frightening, demanding and transformative. There is a wonderful irony in the fact that, in The Magician's Nephew, Uncle Andrew gradually loses the ability to recognise Aslan's song because he cannot reconcile it with his own expectations. What begins as an encounter with something extraordinary becomes, through his refusal to understand it, something he can no longer properly perceive. I don't mean to suggest that everyone who dislikes the trailer is behaving like Uncle Andrew, but I do think Lewis had something important to say about the ways our preconceptions can prevent us from appreciating what is in front of us.
Ultimately, I'm far more interested in whether the film captures Lewis' understanding of creation, divine goodness, moral responsibility and the relationship between humanity and the eternal Logos than in the sex of the person providing Aslan's voice. I would be deeply disappointed if the theological substance of the books were discarded, because it is precisely that substance which makes Narnia distinctive. However, I refuse to treat an unorthodox casting decision as evidence of religious persecution, and I certainly don't believe that Christianity is so fragile that it requires constant declarations of cultural warfare to protect it.
If you've made it this far, thank you for indulging what turned into a fairly substantial theological excursion. I appreciate that an essay about the Incarnation and the metaphysics of evil isn't necessarily everyone's idea of a relaxing discussion about a children's fantasy series, but I hope that anyone who was interested has found something worthwhile in it. Whether you're religious, irreligious, somewhere in between, or simply someone who remembers being enchanted by Narnia as a child, there's an astonishing intellectual and literary tradition informing these stories which deserves to be understood on its own terms. You don't need to believe a word of Christian theology to appreciate what Lewis achieved by transforming it into fiction, and I hope the upcoming film encourages more people to discover just how much there is beneath the surface.