Beasts, Heroes, and Monsters: Configuring the Moral Imaginary
C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia present a fascinating narrative site for an examination of the effects of children’s stories on young audiences. The tales that we share with our youngsters not only reflect our deepest cultural and ethical traditions; they also feed the mythic imaginations of the young, and help to shape their value systems in ways that remain doggedly faithful to the traditional beliefs of the group. Children’s stories provide the valiant models for children’s emulation, and the frightful monsters they must learn to dread and shun. The battles and triumphs of fantasy heroes teach the most esteemed standards of conduct, the grand ideals of heroic souls, and the glories of honorable enterprise.
Even noble failures set examples for emulation. In the tradition of the Homeric epic, the timeless tales of adventures sketch the triumphs and losses of the noblest actors and communicate to their audiences that the short-lived glory of the war-torn hero is preferable to the long-lived mediocrity of the commoner. On the other hand, the wickedness of the villain provides examples of monstrous behaviors to be recognized as vicious and appropriately avoided. For many people, the “identity politics” that will determine what kind of human being they will become is initiated in the nursery, under the thrall of the earliest fantasy tales.
Philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre argues that the narratives shared within a culture wield such prodigious power that they compose “intellectual prophecies” that eventually come to fulfillment as “social performance.”1 This is plausible with respect to broadly accepted cultural myths and ethnic folklore, which often claim an exclusive status as “the people’s story” or as “human truth,” and these pseudo-histories are often deemed more reliable than the political memories of states, or the entries in history books. The latter are invariably decided by the victors of history’s battles, whereas “people’s histories” are emblazoned in the mythic narratives of the culture.
We rarely entertain the possibility, however, that children’s fiction and fantasy stories may wield an equally persuasive power over social attitudes and performance. Fairy tales hardly seem to be the stuff from which cultural truth is crafted. Monsters, elves, and ogres are clearly creatures of fiction, so it seems unlikely that tales involving them will be mistaken for “truth.” However, it is precisely because children’s tales are not served up as serious, that they hide their persuasive power behind a mask of playful pretense. Moreover, since they are taken up in fun, and the characters are utterly fantastic and their valiant deeds are quite fictitious, the “truths” communicated in childhood tales may retain a power over the mythic imaginations of the young. The subliminal messages of fantasy tales can seep down into the psyches of young listeners and eventually lodge in the truth assumptions of the culture. Their hidden “truths” may persist in having a direct influence on the beliefs and behaviors adopted by the society.
One might argue that, in modernity, with its scientific, secularized worldview, there is a clear distinction between the “certain” data (logos) of empirical experience and the irrational claims of fantasy stories (mythos), so that the risk of blurring the boundaries between the two is no longer a realistic danger. Critics may argue that the “mythic”—with its larger than life symbols, its fantastic imagery and its paradoxical logic—no longer has the power to control the imaginations of reasonable people.
However, as philosopher Dudley Young has argued, the seductive power of narrative is actually heightened precisely because the emotive (“mythic”) aspect of existence is largely missing from the modern world. In Origins of the Sacred, Young cites this lost dimension of reality (historically nourished and satisfied by religious festival, ritual frenzy, and celebratory feast) as a dangerous impoverishment of the emotional depth and quality of human existence. That impoverishment, claims Young, makes people perilously susceptible to the seductive manipulation of demagogues.2
The phenomenon of the Hitler Youth provides a frightening example of “mythically impoverished” folk swept away in a frenzied collective madness by the words of a charismatic leader. Even the philosopher Martin Heidegger, so sensitive to the morally precarious arrogances of traditional metaphysics, was, in the early days of National Socialism, seduced by Hitler’s mythic glorifications of Germany’s past and his promises of its grand destiny (themselves grounded in metaphysical assumptions). Under this seduction, Heidegger could interpret the early excesses of the Fuehrer (for instance, banning his Jewish colleagues from university teaching) as reasonable within the “superior wisdom” of the “god [that might] save us now” from a decadent modernity.3
Veiled and hazy, the symbols and logic that confront the reader—especially the young reader—in fantasy tales can prove powerful indeed, especially in modern times with the impoverishment of people’s cultural, familial and spiritual worlds. The “truths” communicated in children’s tales can remain insidiously functional, determining thoughts and behaviors in their audience. At best, the borders between reality and fiction remain blurred for most young children. Even grown-ups may be incapable of raising a conscious, rational challenge to the moral and political messages hidden deeply between the lines of seductive tales they read.
For these reasons, as Plato claims, it is crucial that we take great care with the tales we tell our young. Convinced that gymnastics, melodic harmonies, and the “music” of fictional tales can mold a person’s character, Plato censors even the nursery stories in his city in logos described in the Republic.4 The younger one is, the slimmer the gap in one’s mind between truth and fiction, the more easily one can mistake the illusory for the real. And the more this happens, the more power these stories can hold over one’s ideas and behaviors.
The Modern Framework for Truth and Ethics
The Western world as we know it began with our ancient Greek ancestors. Our ancestors were culturally born when Indo-European warrior tribes, like marauding Calormenes, descended from the Russian steppes, slaughtered their way across the continent and settled around the Mediterranean Sea. Hyper-masculine and male-sky-god worshipping, these warrior heroes butchered those in their path. But, in time, they came to settle down and assimilate the earthy, mother-goddess-worshipping indigenous folk of the sea lands. Together, the two combined to form a new culture—one that worshipped war but also wisdom, that celebrated the war god (Ares) but also had a special relationship with the god of love (Eros) and hailed the goddess of the hearth (Hestia), who defended families from harm.
The ancient Greeks were thus a far more complex people than is generally acknowledged. They settled in the mountain valleys and worked the soil, but worshipped the heavens and loved the seas. They elevated their warrior-heroes but also revered their philosophers and their statesmen. Like Reepicheep, they proved their valor in daring sea adventures and in contests of battle. But they also advanced the arts and the sciences and developed the first universities. Our ancestral culture celebrated the excellences of spirit that made for colonial adventure and war. But they also prized other, more ethereal excellences; beauty, wisdom, temperance and justice served as the overriding “truths” of the ancient Greek world. Hybris—the overblown arrogant pride that was thought to be mercilessly punished by the gods—was regarded as the worst of human faults.
The special mixture of warrior and philosopher that composed the “best” of the ancient world is imaged in the patron goddess of Athens, Athena, goddess of wisdom but also of war. It is also manifest in the ancient Greek worldview that understood the being of beings in terms of the delicate balance between opposing forces (enantioi) come together as a holistic, harmonious universe. In the ancient Greek view, the universe is coherent, cooperative, and purposeful. God or Nature (physis) is good, healing, and orderly.5 In the ancient worldview, justice composes the inner balance that simultaneously guarantees the integrity of each individual thing and that thing’s harmonious relations with reality as a whole.
In the seventeenth century, however, the humble and reverent ancient Greek metaphysics lost its grip to new, “modern” ideas. Philosopher René Descartes (1596–1650), widely considered the Father of Modernity, offered a new account of the nature of reality that diminished the significance of the material world and elevated human reason to divine heights. Descartes laid the framework for modern understandings of self and world that still rule in the West. In his Discourse on Method (1637), he sets forth the only correct method for investigating the nature of things: the brave adventurer into the unknown need only break complex problems down into smaller units until we arrive at the simplest truths, and then put these simple truths into order and link them to their natural consequences. Thus may all things be successfully probed, penetrated, ripped asunder, and reconstructed into clear and distinct ideas.
With Descartes, modern arrogances of knowledge replaced the ancient wisdom of humility. Gone are the gods from the liveliness of things; gone is the internal balance of nature, its inner justice, its seductive telos, its inherent healing properties. Gone is the mystery of Being and beings. Only the intrepid warrior-scientist remains to expose the naked secrets of nature in the marketplaces and battlefields of the world.
Narnia and Modern Militarism
At first glance, the symbols and imagery of the Narnia Chronicles follow a conservative pattern—a pattern now widely recognized as dangerous to our impressionable young, a pattern that fosters an ideology of war instead of ideals of justice and harmony. The characters of Narnia emerge in stark moral garb—good guys and bad guys, heroes and monsters. Uncomplicated heroes like Rilian and Tirian march fearlessly into danger—courageous, intrepid, undaunted by threat of death. Crusades are launched and battles are fought, good men (and bears, horses, and Centaurs) fall in noble defeat, and are mourned and celebrated by their survivors. Finally, victims are rescued, the wicked are expunged from a vulnerable world, and all is put right through moral action that finds its highest expression in the gallantries of war.
As in many fantasy tales, the ethic that undergirds the Narnia stories is openly militaristic. The virtues celebrated in the Narnia tales are those of the warrior—brazen courage, fortitude in battle, (blind) obedience to the commander—rather than the balanced spectrum of inward excellences that Plato heralds as necessary to the life of virtue—temperance, justice, and courage under the yoke of a wise reason. Courage and perseverance against all odds drive the wearied king ever onwards in his quest to save his threatened world. The good powers are mostly powerful male images (from Aslan to the various kings of Narnia); the evil ones (for example, the swarthy Calormenes and the black dwarfs) tend to be menacing and dark. The old clichés (white is good; dark is evil) that drove modern imperialisms continues to hold sway in the Chronicles. Aslan, the ruling force of Narnia, symbolizing the ruling deity in the tales, is repeatedly said to be “not a tame lion” (LB, Chapter 2, pp. 677, 679; Chapter 3, p. 682; Chapter 7, p. 707). The very image of the lion signifies raw masculine power. The lion is lauded as King of the Jungle, nourished and served by his female counterpart in real jungles of the world.
Aslan represents the voice of reasoned goodness, yet his rules can also be troubling. Aslan declares that the animals and trees with voices are not to be harmed, while killing the voiceless creatures is acceptable (LB, Chapter 2, p. 677). This reconfirms an old political prejudice that has historically been rallied to elevate the interests of the home group over those of strangers and foreigners. It communicates that the members of the linguistic community—politically franchised, legitimate members of the dominant group—are “naturally” more worth-y than those that are linguistically alienated. The latter are excluded from the dominant discourse, silenced “in their very nature” by the ruling force that created them.
Aslan is also a transcendent ruler. Just as the god of the Judeo-Christian world does not intercede to prevent the sufferings and degradations of lands and peoples, Aslan is absent throughout most of the Narnia histories, retiring after a glorious creation spectacle and reappearing only sporadically until the end of decaying time. The god of Narnia does not linger within the things of creation but, as in modernity, stands over them as a distant figure of might in a universe that is power-driven and deeply hierarchical in its very nature.
Battles still decide the winners and the losers in the Chronicles, as in the imperialist era, and the battles are largely confrontations between conflicting truths. Wars decide what is true and who has moral entitlement to power, thus re-instituting the dangerous idea that might establishes right. Consistent with the most troubling ethnocentric adventurisms of the imperialistic era, the Narnia tales claim that it is knowledge that establishes moral legitimacy and rightful power. Roonwit the Centaur, the valiant servant of the king of Narnia, reminds us that a “noble death is a treasure which no one is too poor to buy” (LB, Chapter 8, p. 717). It is this belief that continues to motivate many a wide-eyed soldier to the frontlines of modern battles, as well as many a terrorist youth to strap explosives to his belly and walk into an innocent crowd.
Lewis versus Modern Militarism
On a closer reading, however, the Chronicles display many traits that work to undermine the militaristic ethic and to disarm the violence-legitimating features characteristic of many fairy and fantasy tales. Many of the characters—Aravis, Susan, Eustace, Edmund, Tumnus, Emeth and the duped animals in The Last Battle, to name only a few—are neither wholly good nor wholly evil. The clear white of goodness and dark of evil that are raised as paradigm images in The Magician’s Nephew come to be complicated and undermined by the images of the White Witch and the Green Witch in other Narnia tales.
Moreover, the Narnia tales clearly condemn unjust and unnecessary violence. As his characterizations of Miraz, Jadis, Gumpas, the Green Witch, and the Calormenes illustrate, Lewis is quick to condemn aggression and despotism as responsible for much of the evil in the world. Even the good King shares in the warrior’s unfortunate tendency to grab too quickly for a weapon when feeling threatened (LB, Chapter 2, p. 680). Lewis demonstrates that heroes are very brave, but often foolishly so. He also shows how to redeem oneself from this flaw: when heroes are too quick with their swords, they must, as Tirian does in The Last Battle, bravely admit their error and accept the “justice of Aslan” for their misdeeds (LB, Chapter 3, p. 682).
Lewis does not condemn all violence in the Chronicles, however. He leaves room for notions of “righteous indignation” and “just war,” as do most peace-loving philosophers. Where good cause can be shown for taking up the sword, one must not flinch at one’s duty to protect the innocent and fight the good fight. The good violence of self-defense against the Calormenes, the just war of liberation against the White Witch, the slaying of the Green Witch, and the retributive violence against the bullies of Experiment House serve as examples of good violence that must be suffered if good ends are to be brought about.
Though the Chronicles may, on the surface, seem to serve the same god of war to which many a crusading epic ministers, Lewis punctuates the battles with moral struggles and refusals of violence. Many subtle moral messages against wanton violence, victimization, and unnecessary force are embedded in the tales. The complications he introduces in the characters and plotlines of the stories frustrate any facile moralizations about purely good or purely evil things and people. Moreover, the tales culminate in an unanticipated outcome so deep in its Platonic symbolism as to defy any simplistic either/or dichotomies.
The figure of Aslan serves as a paradigm, a ruling divine image of goodness. That image haunts every story, although Aslan himself comes and goes from the tales. His presence and absence could be argued to symbolize the various stages of religious belief and to reflect the historical waverings of human beings and their relations with the god-image throughout history. Now immanent, now transcendent, the god is present in people’s lives and minds even in his absence from the current history. Ultimately, the disappearances of Aslan attest that, when the god is absent from his creation, little remains sacred. Life becomes cheap and humans fabricate their own gods and declare their own “goods” and values. In short, might becomes right in the absence of an overriding moral force. The treacheries of Shift, Ginger, and the Calormenes in The Last Battle provide a glaring demonstration that when the god is missing from the earth, the unscrupulous can co-opt the god’s power and manipulate the trusting masses to fulfill their evil designs.
The Chronicles overturn another dangerous legacy of Western religion and politics. The myth of the primal fall from paradise, a myth common to almost every religious system, has supported a pervasive popular assumption that humans are fundamentally fallen, flawed, and decadent. This myth, I have argued elsewhere,6 is responsible for a ubiquitous and lingering sense of guilt, loss and unworthiness that undermines a healthy worldview and positions people for resentment and violence. The conviction that human nature is fundamentally corrupt is a frequent underpinning of the ideology of Realpolitik. The former belief (that human nature is essentially corrupt) counsels violence against evil “others,” while the latter belief (that all nations are pitted in a war of all against all) counsels war against other nations. Lewis re-appropriates the original goodness and innocence of the human world and undercuts the demoralizing effects of the “myth of the fall” by glorifying Adam and Eve as the venerated ancestors of the human world (LB, Chapter 16, pp. 764–65).
In addition, the Chronicles clearly expose the dangers of blind allegiance and the folly of trusting corrupt leaders. The political rhetoric that serves wicked leaders’ designs is revealed as powerfully manipulative and seductively deceptive, even where clearly empirically false. For example, Queen Jadis tells Polly and Digory that, with a single word—“the Deplorable Word”—she wiped out all her subjects and destroyed their entire world. Lewis implies here that words in the mouths of the powerful can do great harm to innocent people. When the children, shocked, wonder aloud what sort of justice could permit innocent subjects to be killed by their own queen, the Queen responds: “Don’t you understand? I was the Queen. They were all my people. What else were they there for but to do my will?” (MN, Chapter 5, p. 42).
From this declaration, the reader is shown the folly of trusting blindly in authority. All leaders must prove their worthiness to rule by promoting the common good. From the mouths of these innocents, who were trying to make sense of the world of power and politics, emerges the question that challenges the status quo of all power relations: do the powerful care about justice at all? Lewis urges the reader to ponder: Is the duty of the good statesman to serve as the caretaker of the flock, or are the powerful simply tyrants over the helpless masses?
The Queen, however, denies innocence a voice in political matters. She concludes the discussion by declaring, “I had forgotten that you are only a common boy. How should you understand reasons of State?” (MN, Chapter 5, p. 42). This pronouncement forces the reader to recall that the power elitisms that compose political hierarchies also determine moral classifications within the society. “Reasons of state” have always been cited by leaders to justify oppression. In the early centuries of the modern era, colonialism, imperialism, and the slaughter of hundreds of millions of innocent peoples was carried out in the name of god and country. The reader is made to recall that many of the evil designs of leaders have, historically, been cloaked in the secrecy and false legitimacy of “reasons of state.” In the revealing light of hindsight, those historical “reasons of state” have proven as unjust and unreasonable as those of the Evil Queen.
Humans need moral inspiration from on high, but human leaders can lead them far astray from justice and goodness and into the dark night of worldly battle. Just as the god of the Jews and the Christians and the Muslims has receded into the transcendent clouds in the modern era, so does Aslan fail to “turn up . . . nowadays” in Narnia to correct people’s false assumptions and lead them aright (LB, Chapter 1, p. 674). As a result, the beasts among us get bad ideas. Leaders lead us along terrible paths. Lewis warns what fate will ensue when this happens: all worlds draw to an end as they decay.
Lewis employs Platonic images and themes throughout the Chronicles. Like Plato, he hopes to seduce the reader into a deeper analysis of the personages and events staged in the stories in order to lure the reader toward ethical reflection on established certainties. The allusions to Plato finally become explicit at the close of the Chronicles, where worlds are seen to be simply microcosmic stages on which we act out our living fantasies—caves within caves, worlds within worlds within worlds (LB, Chapter 16, p. 765). As in Plato’s allegory of the cave, Lewis depicts the worlds of politics and economics as microcosmic worlds that emerge and disappear into forgotten histories. All too often, the “truths” we take for granted are false and dangerous ideologies of war and oppression, false images paraded by unscrupulous leaders before commoners who are mentally blinded by the ruling propaganda. Lewis, with his fantasy stories, may be likened to the enlightened Platonic philosopher who returns to the dark cave to dispel the false “truths” of evil politicians and to disseminate the changeless eternal truths hidden in the heavens.
Eternal truth is laid up in the heavens because wisdom and justice in their purest form do not fluctuate with the conveniences of worldly affairs or with the whims of evil leaders. Truth is the property of the gods alone, eternal, enduring, changeless. The sun knows when it is truly right to rise and set; the seasons can be counted upon to arrive at the right time and in the proper order. Stars never lie; men and beasts do (LB, Chapter 2, p. 677). The good is eternal, intangible and always beautiful; it cannot be replaced by the false “goods” of the cave.
In the Chronicles, Lewis presents a compelling critique of modernity. With fantastic characters and unlikely plots, he challenges the reader to meditate upon the dangerous militaristic traditions in the West and to confront the histories of violence perpetrated in the name of god and country. Warnings against the seductive words of unscrupulous leaders are emblazoned in the image of the devastated land of Charn. Worlds can be destroyed by a single deplorable word from a power-drunk ruler. A foreboding alarm sounds from the many dried-up pools of forgotten worlds that dot the Wood between the Worlds.
Lewis closes the many chapters of the many books chronicling the many adventures of children and beasts, kings and queens, Englanders and Narnians by illuminating the fundamental nature of the world in which these adventures had been played out. That world is revealed to be simply one of a great many possible worlds—“like an onion: except that as you continue to go in and in, each circle is larger than the last” (LB, Chapter 16, p. 765). This prediction, rendered in the midst of the destruction of familiar things and lands, militates against the hopelessness of the hyper-rational techno-world that constantly threatens mass destruction of all that we know and love. Worlds will come and go, just as warriors and great rulers and grand empires will come and go. And yet, if we hearken to the lessons embedded in the Narnia tales, there is hope that new chapters of new histories in new worlds will be better than the violent past chapters recorded in the histories of our species.
1 Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), p. 85.
2 Dudley Young, Origins of the Sacred (London: Little, Brown, 1991), Introduction.
3 Heidegger rages against the impoverishment of modernity in An Introduction to Metaphysics when he states, “The spiritual decline of the earth is so far advanced that the nations are in danger of losing the last bit of spiritual energy that makes it possible to see the decline . . . and to appraise it as such” (London: Yale Press, 1959, pp. 37–38).
4 This second city is generally translated “ideal city” but it would be more rightly interpreted as “the city [constructed] of ideas.”
5 Plato, Phaedrus, 246a.
6 Wendy C. Hamblet, The Sacred Monstrous: A Reflection on Violence in Human Communities (Lanham: Lexington, 2004), Chapter 4. Lewis himself accepted the traditional Christian doctrine of the Fall, though he emphasizes that the doctrine need not be understood in ways that conflict with modern scientific views of human origins. See Lewis, The Problem of Pain (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2001), pp. 63–85.