My wife and I spent an evening in Narnia recently. We were at Eden Court Theatre to see the wonderfully-inventive musical version of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe – a touring production marking the 75th anniversary of the publication of C.S. Lewis’s famous children’s fantasy.
You feel there must be something special about the story, and the six other books about Narnia which followed, when an eminent theologian publishes a book-length reflection on them. In The Lion’s World, Rowan Williams claims that C.S. Lewis was doing something radical.
He suggests that the Narnia chronicles offer people to whom the Christian story may seem jaded or irrelevant an ‘invitation to hear the story as if we had never heard it before’. Lewis, he believes ‘is trying to recreate for the reader what it is like to encounter and believe in God’. This is an enormous claim.
It’s perfectly possible to enjoy Narnia on page or stage without any knowledge of the thinking behind it. But is Williams correct? Is the great lion Aslan waiting for us to open the wardrobe door as the four Pevensie children did in the story, and push through the hanging clothes and enter a dimension we have not dreamed of?
The Pevensies find Narnia in thrall to the malicious White Witch, who has plunged the whole land into winter, shrouding it in ice. In our world, is the reality of a creation alive with the presence of God concealed from us by some invisible icy film?
There is hope for Narnia. Joy breaks through, ice melts, creation awakens, hearts of stone become once more pulsingly alive. The children come face-to-face with Aslan, whose coming has awakened the enwintered land.
In him, they find such grace, such love. And those eyes! Eyes which see you, and know you. Loving eyes which awaken you to consciousness of the wrong choices you have made, and to a longing to live life better. The ice in your heart begins to thaw in the warmth of Aslan’s breath and joy comes. Is Rowan Williams correct? Is such an encounter possible for us in 2025?
So often we immerse ourselves in escapist stories, finding brief uplift, but then the last page turns, the credits roll, the curtain falls, and we return to everyday experience. ‘Life’s not like that,’ we sigh.
But in one of the Narnia novels, Aslan tells young Lucy that he is to be found in our world too. ‘But there I have another name. You must learn to know me by that name.’
For this too, is The Lion’s World. The performance ends. We leave the theatre. We can’t quite make out the tread of leonine paws beside us, but he is with us.
