Literature: Lewis in the New Yorker Part II

I just can't turn away from Gopnik's article. It's just so wrong headed that I can't help myself. On the face of it, Gopnik offers a thoughtful condemnation of Lewis' portrayal of Aslan:

Yet a central part of the Gosepel story is that Jesus is not the lion of the faith but the lamb of God, while his other symbolic animal is, specifically, the lowly and bedraggled donkey. The moral foce of the Christian story is that the lions are all on the other side. If we had, say, a donkey, a seemingly uninspiring animal from an obscure corner of Narnia, raised as an uncouth and low-caste beast of burden, rallying the mice and rats and weasles and vultures and the other unclean animals, and then being killed by the lions in as humiliating a manner as possible--a donkey who reemerges, to the shock even of his disciples and devotees, as the king of al creation--now, that would be a Christian allegory. A powerful lion, starting life at the top of the food chain, adored by all his subjects and filled with temporal power, killed by a despised evil witch for his power and then reborn to rule, is a Mithraic, not a Christian, myth.

It is clear the Gopnik is missing a key point about The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. It most emphatically not a Christian allegory. Not because it is not Christian, but because it is not an allegory. That it shares a very close correlation with the Crucifixion is beyond dispute, but Aslan is not a Christ figure. He does not represent Jesus. He is Jesus. Remember the Pevensie children are from twentieth century England. Nearly two thousand years have passed since a certain incident in Judea. For those of you still doubting me, in Voyage of the Dawn Treader, when Edmund asks Aslan if he is present in his (Edmund's world) also, Aslan responds:

"I am," said Aslan. "But there I have another name. You must learn to know me by that name. This was the very reason why you were brought to Narnia, that by knowing me here for a little you may no me better there."

Animal Farm is an allegory because Stalin is not actually present. Were he to be present the allegory could no longer exist. Thus since Aslas is Jesus, i.e. the Second Person in the Triune God, it need not follow that events should replay exactly as they did on Earth. There does not seem to be be any especial reason why God should be so limited. As to why Lewis chose to make Aslan a lion rather than a lamb, the answer is quite obvious. Religion in the modern era has no trouble with Jesus as outcast. That, in fact, seems to all he is portrayed as. The Last Judgement is not a particularly common theme these days. Lewis was attempting to convey to his readers some idea of the awesome nature of God. That Gopnik can only see Jesus as a man and not as the omniscient and all-powerful God says much about where he is coming from.