My last-but-one post was prompted by my reading of a book on C. S. Lewis’s Narnia series. I’m just completing the inevitable follow-up exercise of re-visiting the series itself, for the first time since I read them to our kids forty years ago. I should add that my parents unaccountably failed to introduce me to the books when I was a kid, so this is only my second time through.
I was struck, in the final book The Last Battle, by the obvious Book of Revelation beast/false prophet allusion, concerning an ape, named Shift, which dresses up a donkey in a lion-skin and manages to fool almost the whole of Narnia into believing it’s a manifestation of Aslan, the series’s leonine Christ-figure.
What Pseudo-aslan orders through the mouth of the ape is self-evidently at complete odds with the beneficient character of the real Aslan. But the poor Narnians are deceived by appearances, Aslan not having appeared for centuries, and even ordinary lions no longer existing there. Signs and wonders often delude.
The evil policies are sold to them by Shift’s slogan, “Aslan is not a tame lion.” This phrase appears in other books, having its foundation in the fact of Aslan’s sovereign freedom. This was introduced in the original The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe when one of the children, discovering Aslan is a lion, asks, “Is he safe?” She receives the reply, “No, he is not safe – but he is good.” The Narnians who remain loyal judge the usurper by its character, instead of by appearances.
Now, Lewis’s imagery is sometimes almost stereotypical, or certainly universal, such as the biblical Christ-likeness of Aslan or the imagery of John’s Apocalypse for the Beast and the False prophet, which I have already mentioned. Sometimes, though, it is clearly prompted by things in Lewis’s contemporary world, such as the tongue-in-cheek way the headmistress of Eustace and Jill’s ghastly progressive school in England, sacked for multiple misdemeanours, is promoted to be a school inspector and, failing utterly in that, is shoe-horned into Parliament by her friends and, in Lewis’s phrase, “lived there happily ever after.”
So it’s very possible that the “Aslan is not a tame lion” line has some particular 1950s context. After all, in the same book the villains follow Comparative Religion fashion by claiming that Aslan and the demonic deity of the neighbouring Calormenes, Tash, are really one and the same (Tashlan). Their error only emerges when in characteristic Lewis fashion, the real Tash, a devilish monster rather than a god, turns up and starts consuming them. There may be a peculiarly 2026 parallel to that debunking of comparative religion, perhaps.
Nevertheless, the “not a tame lion” slogan reminded me of a phone call I had after my recent YouTube podcast from a retired academic who has been deprogramming from Charismania. He was recalling how he had directly experienced the way that pointing out the mad excesses of, for example, the Toronto Blessing led to the accusation that he was “putting God in a box.” So just as Pseudo-aslan ordered the felling (ie murder) of the talking trees which Aslan had given the gift of speech, so “holy disorder” is attributed to the Holy Spirit in the face of Paul’s insistence that God is order and peace. Biblical principles are less memorable than trite slogans.
“Don’t put God in a box” has become such a cliche that it even occurs in children’s choruses, perhaps without the author realising how it is invariably used to contradict biblical revelation. It tends to be used by the same people who will say that “God is doing a new thing,” which is the perversion of a phrase actually found in Isaiah, where it is all about the coming New Covenant,and not about some supposedly superior addition to the New Covenant.
In The Last battle the ape also also insists that “Aslan” (only brought out silently to be seen at night to disguise his donkey nature) has said that Shift the ape is his sole spokesman, and that they must obey him on pain of death. Another common Hypercharismatic phrase comes to mind: “Do not touch the Lord’s anointed.” This is used to foreclose any criticism of “apostles and prophets” who, like the ape, have actually appointed themselves. C. S. Lewis’s own prophetic insight seems a lot greater, for by the end Shift has taken to the bottle – a remarkably similar fate to many of the false prophets exposed nowadays in the Megachurches.
Another perceptive insight of Lewis is the way that he pictures the result of the exposure of the fraud. Our heroes anticipate that by displaying the donkey in its tatty lion-skin, all will be restored. To their dismay, they find that a large proportion of the deceived conclude that, since that religion was a fraud, so must all religion be – King Rilian can keep his Aslan! This matches the observation that Satan uses cults not so much to get people to follow false religion, but to become disillusioned with all faith once, inevitably, the deception is exposed.
And so, as so often with Lewis, I find his now quite dated societal observations to be even more apt in our own day. Sadly, this last book in the Narniad, with its religion-of-antichrist background, culminates in the final destruction of Narnia, the protagonists’ translation to Aslan’s own heavenly country coinciding, in our world, with their death in a train crash.
Were that apocalyptic parallel to prove as true of our own time as the rest of what we’ve explored, then I suppose the ending could be seen either as a divine comedy, or as a tragedy, depending on whose side you’re on.
