Narnia, Christianity and "Universal Myth"

Disney struggles with how to market "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe". Should they acknowledge it as a specifically Christian allegory (as C.S. Lewis intended) or try to depict it as more of an undifferentiated fairy-story?

But the company will probably proceed gingerly. Look for, at most, study guides to be prepared for Sunday school classes, local discussion groups to be organized and blocks of tickets to be offered to churches at a discount (a technique that figured heavily in the box-office triumph of "The Passion of the Christ"). Those who want to see Aslan as a Jesus figure or the White Witch as his satanic opponent will find little to encourage or discourage their interpretation, even though that interpretation was its author's own.

"They're seeing it from 10,000 feet, from which the religious themes are no longer specific to Christianity, but part of the great Joseph Campbell tradition of universal myth," Mr. Kaplan, of the Lear Center, said of "Narnia's" new caretakers. "When you get to that level, it's broadly acceptable to the public."

One wonders how Lewis would react to this row. I would say he would smile, except it's difficult to picture Lewis smiling, Ulstermen being by nature so dour. I do think, however, he would have found odd, and perhaps amusing, the insistence that "Christian allegory" and "universal myth" are somehow antipodes, that Disney must, in effect, treat the story as one or the other.

Lewis, after all, was a man who believed, having been convinced by JRR Tolkien, that myth was universal because Christianity was true. As he wrote to Arthur Greeves:

Now the story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened: and one must be content to accept it in the same way, remembering that it is God's myth where the others are men's myths: i.e. the Pagan stories are God expressing Himself though the minds of poets, using such images as He found there, while Christianity is God expressing Himself through what we call "real things".[Joseph Pearce, TOLKIEN: MAN AND MYTH, p. 60]

There's an even more on-point quote, which I think is from Lewis (though it may be from Tolkien or Chesterton) which I'm having trouble finding but which basically says that, if fallen man's destiny is to be saved by the incarnation, death and resurrection of God-made-man, it's not surprising that there should be, in diverse and far-flung cultures, some remembrance of that fact.

The debate is therefore somewhat moot. No matter how hard you try to generalize, or secularize, Narnia, you cannot take away its Christian essence (unless, I suppose, you radically rework the plot) - because all stories of that kind, whether intentionally or not, are stories about Christ. And no matter how explicitly sectarian and Christian you make it, the story cannot lose its universal character - because, at bottom, the Christian myth and the universal myth are the same myth.

(via Open Book)