Greta Gerwig’s Aslan Would Have Horrified C. S. Lewis

I remember the first time hearing my mother read the opening scene of The Dawn Treader to me. It came alive in my mind’s eye—the painting turning to life, water filling the room, suddenly the children swimming in the sea. I felt like I was there. Lewis’s Narnia feels near to the children and adults who read the tales.

Multiple filmmakers have tried to take on the task of bringing Narnia to the screen. The next attempt comes from Netflix and director Greta Gerwig’s The Magician’s Nephew. As the release draws nearer, reports confirm the gossip around Gerwig’s David Bowie-inspired aesthetic and the casting of Meryl Streep as the voice of Aslan.[1] What does the voice of Aslan sound like? Should we care who the voice is? Would Lewis care?

Here are 5 things I think Lewis would say, based on what he did say:

More than Mere Allegory

The controversy over a woman voicing the male lion Aslan has been widespread. A few defend the decision by showing how Lewis praised allegory.

However, Aslan is not allegory. Lewis says in a letter in 1954 that he’s not writing allegory like The Pilgrim’s Progress. Instead, he explains Narnia, Aslan, and the Incarnation to the child:

“I did not say to myself ‘Let us represent Jesus as He really is in our world by a Lion in Narnia’: I said ‘Let us suppose that there were a land like Narnia and that the Son of God, as He became a Man in our world, became a Lion there, and then imagine what would happen.’ If you think about it, you will see that it is quite a different thing.” [2]

Aslan is a supposal, not allegory, not representation, not typology. Allegory uses a fictional stand-in for an idea you could state separately, so the figure just needs decoding back into that meaning and adds nothing beyond it. A supposal instead asks “what if this same real person or truth showed up under different invented circumstances,” so Aslan isn’t a symbol for Christ but an imaginative further instance of him; thus, he carries real weight and can’t be handled however the story’s rhetoric happens to want. For Lewis, Narnia was an imaginative place where the eternal Son of God took on the flesh of a lion. One cannot simply change the representation Lewis created.

Interpretation and Blasphemy

We all know the one person who says, “The book is better than the movie.” That’s not what I’m doing here. Movies function differently than books. The medium forces decisions on scripts, actors, and aesthetics that a novel never has to make.

Lewis wrote to his friend:

“But about Snow-White. Leaving out the tiresome question of whether it is suitable for children (which I don’t know and don’t care), I thought it almost inconceivably good and bad — I mean, I didn’t know one human being could be so good and bad. The worst thing of all was the vulgarity of the winking dove at the beginning, and the next worst the faces of the dwarfs. Dwarfs ought to be ugly of course, but not in that way. And the dwarfs’ jazz party was pretty bad. I suppose it never occurred to the poor boob that you could give them any other kind of music. But all the terrifying bits were good, and the animals really most moving: and the use of shadows (of dwarfs and vultures) was real genius.” [3]

Notice the choices Lewis hated in the animated film. Doves winking, cartoonish dwarfs, and jazz music. Lewis tended towards being a curmudgeon. He did not like when people messed with things he loved, like dwarfs in his favorite stories. He couldn’t stand Disney choosing jazz music; Lewis preferred classical music.

Now consider the choices of Gerwig: Aslan looking like David Bowie, Aslan voiced by a woman, the film feeling like a rock opera. I have little doubt Lewis would have harsher words for these choices than for Disney. Especially because of who Aslan is. Lewis wrote again on Disneyfying Aslan:

“I am sure you understand that Aslan is a divine figure, and anything remotely approaching the comic (above all anything in the Disney line) would be to me simple blasphemy.” [4]

Changing Aslan to make him more palatable to a modern audience is exactly the kind of change Lewis called blasphemy. And for him, this wasn’t about denying femininity a place in his theology. It was about what masculine imagery specifically was doing. On the other hand, Lewis knew the exact place of the feminine in his theology.

Proper Place of Masculine and Feminine

Lewis addressed God’s design of men and women in the church and its relationship to masculine and feminine aspects of theology. In “Priestesses in the Church?” Lewis wrote about the decision of the Church of England to allow women to be priests — a question that still comes up in denominations today. Lewis explains:

“Common sense, disregarding the discomfort, or even the horror, which the idea of turning all our theological language into the feminine gender arouses in most Christians, will ask ‘Why not? Since God is in fact not a biological being and has no sex, what can it matter whether we say He or She, Father or Mother, Son or Daughter?’ But Christians think that God Himself has taught us how to speak of Him. To say that it does not matter is to say either that all the masculine imagery is not inspired, is merely human in origin, or else that, though inspired, it is quite arbitrary and unessential. And this is surely intolerable: or, if tolerable, it is an argument not in favour of Christian priestesses but against Christianity. It is also surely based on a shallow view of imagery. Without drawing upon religion, we know from our poetical experience that image and apprehension cleave closer together than common sense is here prepared to admit; that a child who has been taught to pray to a Mother in Heaven would have a religious life radically different from that of a Christian child. And as image and apprehension are in an organic unity, so, for a Christian, are human body and human soul.”[5]

Lewis does not hold back. The design and revelation of God with masculine imagery is inspired. Arguing that it is not inspired would question the whole revelation of God in Christianity. Now, some might dismiss Lewis and say he’s just a man of his time and would think differently today. However, you would likely then have to argue that this progress is not chronological snobbery. I think Lewis would argue against that, too.

He saw the representation of God on behalf of the priest tied directly to Jesus Christ. The church then approaches God as the feminine, the Bride of Christ. Lewis wrote:

“Only one wearing the masculine uniform can represent the Lord to the Church: for we are all, corporately and individually, feminine to Him.” [6]

My aim here is not to argue about a woman’s role in the church. (As a convictional Baptist, I hold to the BFM2000). Instead, I want to show Lewis in his own words. He considers gender—especially in relation to God, Jesus Christ, and the Church—an essential matter in how God reveals himself. Aslan, Lewis’s supposal of the Incarnate Son, brings that same second person of the Trinity into Narnia as a masculine lion. He’s a good lion, but not safe. The children could come to him because of his goodness.

Engaging Modern Myths

What then should we make of this new adaptation and interpretation of Narnia? Some have defended Gerwig’s right to create her own interpretation of Aslan. In one sense, that’s true — Gerwig has creative freedom from Netflix and the license of Lewis Ltd to adapt as she sees fit.

The generations of readers will come to their own decisions about seeing the movie, keeping Netflix, and selling its stock. I intend to see the film. I think Lewis would go and scoff at part. In fact, if you get the chance to go through a book from his personal library, he will scoff at the author, such as I. A. Richards’s rhetoric book, exclaiming, “you’ve not been poor!”[7] when Richards attempted a metaphor about poverty. Lewis engaged all sorts of stories and myths, so that he could proclaim the true myth.

Lewis says, “We must not, in false spirituality, withhold our imaginative welcome.”[8] He knew that even in pagan myths and Netflix films, stories opened up the imagination to the ideas of Christianity. The incarnation is the only myth that both explains reality and is rooted in historic fact.

Approach like a Child

While this movie will certainly make some changes that will frustrate Narnia faithful. It wasn’t the first time, and it’s unlikely to be the last. So scoff when needed and smile when appropriate, roll your eyes and wipe tears from them, laugh with the children enjoying the magical world, and laugh at Hollywood’s newest attempt. But always come back to Aslan. He invites us to come to him, and it’s best as a child.

Perhaps I will have my mother read part of The Magician’s Nephew for my sons and me and remember what it’s like to be transported through Lewis’s words into Narnia to meet Aslan. That is how it all works. In one of the last letters Lewis wrote, on the eve of his death, he told a young child:

“It is a funny thing that all the children who have written to me see at once who Aslan is, and grown-ups never do!” [9]

Come to him, and to the one who truly came to earth. Christ welcomes all of us who approach with the faith of a child.

[1] https://www.empireonline.com/movies/features/narnia-magicians-nephew-explained-wood-between-the-worlds-aslan-jadis-magic-rings/

[2] Lewis, Collected Letters, 3.480.

[3] Lewis, Collected Letters, 2.242.

[4] Lewis, Collected Letters, 3.491.

[5] Lewis, “Priestesses in the Church?” God in the Dock, 237.

[6] Lewis, “Priestesses in the Church?” God in the Dock, 239.

[7] Lewis marginalia note inside margin of I. A. Richards, The Philosophy of Rhetoric, 105. Located at the Wade Center, Wheaton College.

[8] Lewis, “Myth Became Fact,” God in the Dock, 142.

[9] Lewis, Collected Letters, 3.1483.