Chapter 2—
“A Great Sculptor’s Shop”: Law and Grace
inThe Lion, the Witch and
the Wardrobe
“All my seven Narnian books,” Lewis wrote in
1960, “and my three science fiction books, began with seeing pictures in my
head. At first they were not a story, just pictures. The Lion all began with the picture of a Faun carrying an umbrella and
parcels in a snowy wood.” He deiced one day to try to make a story out of that
and a few other pictures, without knowing how or where the story would go. “But
then suddenly Aslan came bounding into it” and gave direction and unity to the
story: he drew the Christian element in and “pulled the whole story together.”1
Important as Aslan is, however, the unity of the story depends less upon him
than upon magic, the quality which determines the imaginative response to the
book and gives it a more complete unity than the unity of character. The flavor
of magic permeates The Lion, the Witch
and the Wardrobe, unifying event and image, technique and theme, atmosphere
and archetype. Through it the finest effects of the story are achieved—the
transformation of what are intellectual concepts in our world into images which
affect readers imaginatively and emotionally in the world of Narnia.
The opening chapters of the book
establish the basic [ß p. 19] magic of Narnia. It is introduced by a
magic wardrobe: in the words of Lucy, who entered it first, “It’s—it’s a magic
wardrobe. There’s a wood inside it, and it’s snowing, and there’s a Faun and a
witch, and it’s called Narnia” (p. 21). The magic works next for Edmund, who
follows Lucy through the wardrobe a few days later and encounters a different
kind of magic: a great lady in white who produces a cut of hot drink and a box
of enchanted Turkish Delight by dropping liquid into the snow. Later, by a
still different magic all four children enter Narnia through the wardrobe. In
order to keep out of the way of the housekeeper, Mrs. Macready, and a whole
gang of sightseers, who seem to be coming wherever they go, the children enter
the wardrobe room and then the wardrobe itself. It was as if “some magic in the
house had come to life and was chasing them into Narnia” (p. 49). Lewis uses
magic, then, as it was used in works of the Middle Ages which “have
unmistakably the note of ‘faerie’ about them.”2 From the opening
chapter, this note of magic, or enchantment, is vital to The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, providing the basic
characteristic of the world in which its action takes place.
There is also in these opening
chapters what Tolkien calls the “elvish craft,” the magic which “produces a
Secondary World into which both designer and spectator can enter.”3
It is the magic of the storyteller, using narrative devices to enable the
reader to accept and share the experiences of the Pevensie children as they
enter Narnia. The vivid details allow the reader to participate with Lucy in
the experience of encountering Narnia for the first time, as she reaches ahead
into the darkness of the wardrobe, hears a crunching underfoot, feels the cold
wetness of the snow and the prickliness of the trees, and glimpses the light of
the lamp-post ahead of her. The reader shares her bewilderment and uncertainty
about where she is and what she has gotten into. Lewis continues to make the
world she has entered real and believable by the detailed [ß p. 20] descriptions of Tumnus’s cave and tea
(p. 13) and of his struggle over whether to reveal Lucy’s identity: “The Faun’s
brown eyes had filled with tears and then the tears began trickling down his
cheeks, and soon they were running off the end of his nose; and at last he
covered his face with his hands and began to howl” (p. 14). He also makes the
story convincing by the initial skepticism of the other children. The first to
enter Narnia is the youngest and the most impressionable. The older,
clear-headed realists Edmund, Susan, and Peter are sure that there could not
be, and that there is not, any such world through the wardrobe—until they get
there. The empirical evidence of actually entering Narnia, which brushes aside
their skepticism, convinces the skeptical reader as well.
Lewis also uses the standard devices
of mystery and adventure to involve the reader in the action imaginatively and
emotionally. The story holds one’s interest by the aura of mystery (the
rambling house and strange new land), by the questions that need answers (why
is it always winter? who is Aslan?), and by the excitement of entering Narnia
and braving the perils in it. The unifying adventure, finding and aiding Tumnus
the Faun, contains both mystery and excitement. Having discovered that Tumnus
is missing because of the help he gave Lucy, the children decide they “simply
must try to rescue him” (p. 56), however dangerous that may be. And the reader
follows that adventure with interest and uncertainty throughout the story.
Finally Lewis, from early in the
story, begins to build in foreshadowings which set up later parts: that it is
always winter anticipates the climax of the story as the warmth and joy of
Christmas signal the end of the Witch’s cold and selfish reign. Mention of “the
four thrones at Cair Paravel” (p. 17) anticipates the conclusion of the book,
as do the fur coats that looked “like royal robes” (p. 52) on the four
children. All of these devices—of participation, [ß p. 21] mystery, and foreshadowing—are united in
the first mention of Aslan:
“They
say Aslan is on the move—perhaps has already landed.”
And now a very curious thing
happened. None of the children knew who Aslan was any more than you do; but the
moment the Beaver had spoken these words everyone felt quite different. . . .
At the name of Aslan each one of the children felt something jump in his
inside. (p. 64)
The reader, too, to some extent, shares that
experience. He or she doesn’t know who Aslan is, but some of the sense of
excitement, of awe, and of expectation is conveyed to him or her as it is to
the children.
The magic of Narnia and of the
narrative is used to introduce, although it is apparent only in retrospect, the
theme of Deep Magic, or the Law of Human Nature. The theme focuses on Edmund.
After the four children had entered Narnia, discovered that Tumnus the Faun has
been captured by the Witch for helping Lucy, and been informed and fed by
Beaver and his wife, a crucial episode occurs. Edmund, still lusting for the
White Witch’s candy, commits the treasonous act of deserting his brother and
sisters and betraying their plans to the Witch. Edmund’s act violates the most
basic demands of justice and fair play. Even the youngest of readers will
recognize that Edmund has done a very basic and serious wrong. Edmund himself does not assert that what he
did was right or good; he only attempts to justify it:
But
he managed to believe, or to pretend he believed, that [the Witch] wouldn’t do
anything very bad to [Peter, Susan, and Lucy], “Because,” he said to himself,
“all these people who say nasty things
about her are her enemies and probably half of it isn’t true. She was jolly
nice to me, anyway, much nicer than they are. I expect she is the rightful
Queen really. Anyway, she’ll be better than that awful Aslan!” At least, that
was the excuse he made in his own mind for what he [ß p. 22] was doing. It wasn’t a
very good excuse, however, for deep down inside him he really knew that the
White Witch was bad and cruel. ( pp. 85-86)
Edmund’s efforts to excuse his action show that
he is aware of a standard of conduct he is violating, and that he, like the
readers who judge him, uses that standard as the basis of acceptable behavior.
Thus,
long before the term “Deep Magic” is used, the concept it images—the rules of
fair play and straight dealing—has been introduced. For Deep Magic is what in
our world is called the Law of Nature, or Lewis phrases it in Mere Christianity, “the Law of Human Nature,” the law or rule about
right and wrong which “every one [knows] by nature and [does] not need to be
taught” (p. 18). Through “Deep Magic” Lewis is depicting in a form which
appeals to imagination and emotion, in a form children can relate to, what he
had described conceptually in the opening chapters of Mere Christianity:
Now
what interests me about [such remarks as “How’d you like it if anyone did the
same to you?” and “Come on, you promised”] is that the man who makes them is
not merely saying that the other man’s behaviour does not happen to please him.
He is appealing to some kind of standard of behaviour which he expects the
other man to know about. . . . It looks, in fact, very much as if both parties
had in mind some kind of Law or Rule of fair play or decent behaviour or
morality or whatever you like to call it, about which they really agreed. And
they have. (p. 17)
Deep Magic, like the Law of Nature, is
universal: it applies to Narnians and humans alike and is associated with two
major earthly mythologies. It is written on a Stone Table, recalling the Old
Testament tablets of stone with their superb statement of natural law, and it
is carved “in letters deep as a spear is long on the trunk of the World Ash
Tree” (p. 138), a symbol of the origin and foundation of the world [ß p. 23] in the Icelandic myths.
It is of divine origin—the “Emperor’s magic” (p. 140), “engraved on the sceptre
of the Emperor-Beyond-the-Sea” (p. 138)—but it is not co-existent with the
Emperor: it has existed only from the Dawn of Time. It was created with the
universe, as a magic which makes moral and social order in the universe
possible. Aslan himself ranks adherence to and preservation of it very high:
“‘Work against the Emperor’s magic?’ said Aslan turning to [Susan] with
something like a frown on his face. And nobody ever made that suggestion to him
again” (p. 140). And in Narnia as on Earth, undermining the Magic, now referred
to as “the Law,” will lead to chaos: “Unless I have blood as the Law says,” the
Witch declares, “all Narnia will be overturned and perish in fire and water”
(p. 139).
The
concept of the Law of Nature was very important to Lewis, as it was to Plato,
Aristotle, Aquinas, and Hooker before him. It appears repeatedly elsewhere in
his fiction. In Out of the Silent Planet
Lewis asserts that it is not limited to our world but is true for rational
creatures on other planets as well. The Oyarsa of Malacandra says to Ransom,
“There are laws that all hnau know,
of pity and straight dealing and shame and the like.”4 In That Hideous Strength those laws are embodied
in the attitude that pervades the Manor at St. Anne’s, as Ransom and his
followers seek to adhere to the outlook of his “Masters.” Ransom says of them,
“They are not old fashioned: but they are very very old.”5 These
old, but not old-fashioned, precepts Lewis calls, in his most important
nonfiction work, the Tao, “the doctrine of objective value, the belief that
certain attitudes are really true, and others really false, to the kind of the
thing the universe is and the kind of things we are.”6 Elsewhere he
elaborates on the implications of that definition: “We have only two
alternatives. Either the maxims of traditional morality must be accepted as
axioms of practical reason which neither admit nor require [ß p. 24] argument to support
them and not to ‘see’ which is to have lost human status; or else there are no
values at all.”7 So important is belief in such objective values in
Lewis’s way of thinking that he calls belief in subjective values (a growing
tendency in our times) “the disease that will certainly end our species (and,
in my view, damn our souls) if it is not crushed.”8
The
law alone is stern and unrelenting. In Mere
Christianity Lewis writes, “There is nothing indulgent about the Moral Law.
It is as hard as nails. It tells you to do the straight thing and it does not
seem to care how painful, or dangerous, or difficult it is to do so” (p. 37).
The Stone Table, when the children first see it in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, is “a great grim slab of grey
stone” (p. 121). Thus, after Edmund is rescued from the clutches of the White
Witch by Aslan’s forces, the Witch can claim, justly (no one can put more
emphasis on the justness of a thing than a tyrant, if the thing fits his or her
purposes), that Edmund must die: “Every traitor belongs to me as my lawful prey
and . . . for every treachery I have a right to kill” (p. 139). Lewis chose the
most fundamental and universal element of the moral code, the forbidding of
treachery, as his key: all societies condemn treason and through most of history
have assigned the death penalty to it. To Lewis’s readers, children as well as
adults, the justice of it all is apparent. Edmund’s life is, justly, forfeit.
Deep Magic, the Law of Nature upon which an orderly and just society rests,
demands it.
In
the magical world of Narnia, then, one discovers the importance of Deep Magic,
of the same natural laws as in our world—known, but not kept, by all.
Transcending Deep Magic, however, is another magic, a Deeper Magic from before
the dawn of time, a magic inherent not in created things but in their creator,
the greater magic of grace. That Deep Magic appears in the story before Deeper
Magic is important. They must be considered in that order, Lewis [ß p. 25] had said in his radio
talks, for the latter to make sense: “It is after you have realised that there
is a real Moral Law, and a Power behind the law, and that you have broken that
law and put yourself wrong with that Power—it is after all this, and not a
moment sooner, that Christianity begins to talk” (Mere Christianity, pp. 38-39). So it is too in Narnia. Readers of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe are
first made aware of the fundamental moral law—made aware by recognizing
Edmund’s unfairness first to Lucy and then to the others—in order that Aslan’s death may convey its full meaning.
Aslan,
out of his love or grace—the Deeper Magic—agrees to meet the Witch’s demands by
dying in Edmund’s place. He slips away from the good Narnians’ tent at night,
but is followed by Lucy and Susan, from whose viewpoint the episode is related.
They see Aslan walk up to allow himself to be taken by such people as “Ogres
with monstrous teeth, and wolves, and bull-headed men . . . [and] Cruels and
Hags and Incubuses, Wraiths, Horrors, Efreets, Sprites, Orknies, Wooses, and
Ettins.”
They
rolled the huge Lion round on his back and tied all his four paws together,
shouting and cheering as if they had done something brave, though, had the Lion
chosen, one of those paws could have been the death of them all. But he made no
noise, even when the enemies, straining and tugging, pulled the cords so tight
that they cut into his flesh. Than they began to drag him towards the Stone
Table.
“Stop!” said the Witch. “Let him
first be shaved.”
Another roar of mean laughter went
up from her followers as an ogre with a pair of shears came forward squatted
down by Aslan’s head. Snip-snip-snip went the shears and masses of curling gold
began to fall to the ground. Then the ogre stood back and the children,
watching from their hiding-place, could see the face of Aslan looking all small
and different without its mane. The enemies also saw the difference.
“Why, he’s only a great cat after
all!” cried one.
“Is that what we were afraid of?” said another.
And they surged round Aslan jeering
at him, saying things [ß p. 26] like “Puss, Puss! Poor Pussy,” and “How many
mice have you caught to-day, Cat?” and “Would you like a saucer of milk,
Pussumus?”
“Oh, how can they?” said Lucy, tears streaming down her cheeks. “The brutes,
the brutes!” for now that the first shock was over the shorn face of Aslan
looked to her braver, and more beautiful, and more patient than ever.
“Muzzle him!” said the Witch. And
even now, as they worked about his face putting on the muzzle, one bite from
his jaws would have cost two or three of them their hands. But he never moved.
And this seemed to enrage all that rabble. Everyone was at him now. Those who
had been afraid to come near him even after he was bound began to find their
courage, and for a few minutes the two girls could not even see him—so thickly
was he surrounded by the whole crowd of creatures kicking him, hitting him,
spitting on him, jeering at him. (pp. 148-51)
This is the most nearly
allegorical episode in the Chronicles. The willing sacrifice, the biblical tone
and imagery (it reminds me especially of Isaiah 53: “He was oppressed and
afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth”), and Aslan’s subsequent return to life
clearly associate him with Christ. Yet, Lewis insisted that it was not
allegorical but suppositional: suppose
there was a world like Narnia and that Christ chose to be incarnate and
die and rise again in that world, this is what it might have been like. Given
this approach, the meaning of Aslan’s death should be comprehensible in terms
of the secondary world Lewis created and not be dependent on reference to
another, or primary, world for clarity or effect. The general meaning of
Aslan’s death is very similar to the meaning of the death of Christ in our
world, but one does not need to know or refer to the story of Christ to gain
that meaning. The story itself, by its structural movement from Deep Magic to
Deeper Magic, conveys the magic of grace, which is more important here than the
idea or theology behind that magic. Aslan does not “stand for” Christ; in his
suppositional world he is Christ. His death in Narnia is similar to his death
in our [ß p. 27] world because both are
examples of the same archetype, of the dying and returning god. And the myth in
which his story is recounted conveys the basic meanings of that archetype, the
divine truths of love, sacrifice, and hope.
Aslan’s
death has two divinely magical effects. First, it puts the Law in a new
perspective. At Aslan’s resurrection, “the Stone Table was broken into two
pieces by a great crack that ran down it from end to end” (p. 158). Previously
the Witch could claim the “proper use” of the Stone Table was the execution of
traitors; a broken table cannot be effective for, or symbolic of, that old use.
Second, it changes the meaning and effect of death. As Aslan romps with Susan
and Lucy after his return to life, he explains that, if the White Witch had
known about Deeper Magic, “she would have known that when a willing victim who
had committed no treachery was killed in a traitor’s stead, the Table would
crack and Death itself would start working backwards” (p. 160). The effect of
Deeper Magic, then, is to give life. The direct recipient of this life is, of
course, Edmund, whose life is saved by Aslan’s sacrifice. Before Aslan goes to
his death, he walks apart with Edmund for a “conversation which Edmund never
forgot” (p.135). It apparently was not about the arrangement Aslan was soon to
make with the Witch; Edmund may in fact never have been told about that (p.
177). The important thing is that Edmund comes to know Aslan, and to love him.
As a result of that and of his experiences in Narnia, Edmund gets past
“thinking about himself” and just goes on “looking at Aslan” (p. 138). Edmund’s
life is spared physically and healed spiritually: Lucy finds him “not only
healed of his wounds but looking better than she had seen him look—oh, for
ages. . . . He had become his real old self again and could look you in the
face” (p. 177). Edmund’s experiences continue to have a significant influence
upon his character thereafter, one that is reflected in the name he is given
later as one of the monarchs of Narnia: “Edmund was a [ß p. 28] graver and quieter man
than Peter, and great in council and judgment. He was called King Edmund the
Just” (p. 181). He who has had a personal experience with justice—and its
counterpart of grace—is best able to appreciate its proper use and value.
The
magic of story and narrative, of Deep and Deeper Magic, are, finally, unified
by the vehicle Lewis used for the story, the traditional mode of the romance. The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe,
like most romances, presents a series of adventures with a goal, overthrowing
the White Witch; the goal is apparently frustrated by the death of the hero in
the showdown scene, but it is ultimately achieved after the hero’s return. The
plot pattern, character types, and details in the story (swords, battles,
magic) are all characteristic of romance. The romantic mode is emphasized—even
exaggerated—in the final chapter of the book, as the children appear “in their
hunting array” (p. 185), with a “different style” of talking (“Fair Consorts,
let us now alight from our horses and follow this beast into the thicket”—p.
182). The importance of the mode appears in two ways. Northrop Frye calls
romance “the story of summer,” the mode which pictures idealized human
experience and its wish-fulfillment dream of complete happiness; its
antithetical counterpart, antiromance, “the story of winter,” portrays unideal
experience and is an anxiety dream of total bondage and frustration. Lewis’s
use of winter and spring, then, which works so well to convey to children
imaginatively and emotionally a world dominated by evil and a world luxuriating
in good, takes on a deeper significance as part of an ages-old pattern of basic
human response to nature and life. Inherent in the romance form, furthermore,
is the assumption of an order in and above the world, a sense of unity and of
immanent meaning in the universe. The theme of justice, needed simply to set up
the events of the story, also assumes and points towards the kind of
transcendent order on which the romance form has [ß p. 29] been based for
thousands of years. Providing, imaginatively, a sense of that order and an
acquaintance with the persons behind it—Aslan and the Emperor—is a large part
of the ultimate purpose of the story. The form and theme of The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe
unite, as if by magic, in the romance archetype and its antithesis, in the
movement from unideal to ideal, from perpetual winter to lasting spring, from
the disorder and bondage of the Witch’s rule to the ultimate order, freedom,
and fulfillment of Aslan’s rule.
The
meaning and method of the first Chronicle of Narnia are epitomized shortly
after Aslan’s resurrection when he and the two girls rush to the Witch’s castle
and Aslan begins to breathe on the “courtyard full of statues” they find there
(p. 163). “Everywhere the statues were coming to life. The courtyard looked no
longer like a museum; it looked more like a zoo” (p. 166). Those who were
trapped in stone by the demands of the Stone Table are given new life by the
effects of the Deeper Magic. Lewis echoes here his own analogy in Mere Christianity, where he says that
receiving Zoe, the spiritual life
which is in God from all eternity, would be comparable to a statue being
changed from carved stone to a real man: “And that is precisely what
Christianity is about. This world is a great sculptor’s shop. We are the
statues and there is a rumour going around the shop that some of us are some day
going to come to life” (p. 140). What was metaphor in Mere Christianity becomes reality in Narnia—the idea is transformed
into image. And that is what happens in The
Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe as a whole. In relating the myth about
Aslan, Lewis presents the basic ideas of the Christian faith in our world,
transformed into the images and actions of another world. The movement of the
plot parallels closely the progression of the ideas in The Case for Christianity (the first two sections of Mere Christianity): that there are ideas
of right behavior known to all; that people do not practice the [ß p. 30] sort of behavior they
know is right; that such disobedience puts them wrong with the law and the
power behind the law; without the ability to put themselves right; and that
Christ’s death has somehow put them right again and given them a fresh start.
The structure of the story captures, for the imagination, the shape of the
Christian message and presents it as true in Narnia as well: law first, then
release, through sacrifice and love; first Deep Magic, then Deeper Magic.
Through the enchanting power of the fairy tale, through the elvish magic of
image and myth, The Lion, the Witch and
the Wardrobe conveys a message about divine magic in a form that children
can grasp and identify with more easily than the biblical account, and in a way
that revitalizes for older readers as well truths and feelings which have
become obscured by
familiarity and repetition. [ß p. 31]