I grew up in Christian church and Christian school, and although I was still in grade school when I read the Narnia books, there was one particular piece of theology I knew very well: It’s easy to get to Hell, and hard to get to Heaven.
In fact, the year I read The Last Battle, I was going to a school that taught you could lose your salvation, too. Meaning that if you died at the wrong moment—sometime between messing up and asking for forgiveness—you were still going to Hell, even if you believed in Jesus and had all the right theology and so on.
For me the worst thing about Hell wasn’t the fire and devils and torture forever, it was the thought of not seeing my family ever again. There was a Christian horror film making the rounds at the time called A Thief in the Night and I made the mistake of watching it. There was a scene where all the good followers of God are “raptured” and this little girl comes into her house and hears a teapot whistling and is sure that she’s been “left behind.” That terrified me. Any time the house got too quiet, I was sure it had finally happened.
I was scared. Scared of Hell, scared of God, scared of losing my salvation for doing something wrong. I wrote an essay at my grade school about how you shouldn’t smoke because it’s not worth risking Hell and I got second place. This is the world I inhabited.
My parents—who thought if you received salvation you couldn’t lose it—were concerned about the levels of fear I was putting off, and tried to sit me down and explain not to listen to everything I heard at school, and that to doubt that God would save me was a kind of sin in itself. But it only confused me more, leaving me with a strange theology where I believed that if you prayed to receive Jesus once, that was good. But if you prayed it again, that was a sin because you were doubting God, and therefore God would take away your salvation… Yeah, I was the kid counting whether I was on the even or odd prayer of salvation so I would know if I was getting into Heaven.
As I started reading The Last Battle, even as a kid, I recognized that it was talking about Heaven. The Pevensies (well, most of them) were dead. All the other Narnian characters I cared about were dead. And on the other side of that stable door was a Narnia somehow better and more real than the Narnia they had left. That was, obviously, Heaven. Just like I’d been taught at school and church: it’s the same but better. There’s still food but now it’s all banquets and cups flowing over. We still have roads, but they’re made of gold.
I knew how it would work. Some would make it in and some would not. I was definitely disturbed by the mention of Susan in the book as “no longer a friend of Narnia,” but that fit very well with my theology at the time (and don’t worry! We’re getting to Susan very soon).
I was surprised by the people who managed to get in to the New Narnia. Puzzle, the anti-Christ himself, was somehow in? Some dwarves who didn’t even know they were in the new Narnia, they got in? Shift was rightfully devoured by Tash, as I knew the Calormenes—servants of the evil, false god—would be.
Except then came Emeth.
I loved him…as I think Lewis intended: the noble Calormene who stood up against the evil forces and their false Aslan. I felt a sort of mounting sorrow for him as I saw his end coming. I knew he would be sent to Hell, no matter what I wanted.
But he wasn’t.
I was as confused as Emeth when the Pevensies come across him in the afterlife, and astonished as he began his tale: he had met the great lion, Aslan—big as an elephant and fast as an ostrich. He had been called “my son” by the god of another people, another religion. And Aslan had told him that every good thing he had ever done in the name of Tash had actually been done for Aslan, and any evil thing anyone had ever done in the name of Aslan had actually been done for Tash. So Emeth—who had never met Aslan, had never followed Aslan, had never done any service for Narnia—was in. He was a follower of Aslan without ever knowing it.
I was stunned.
I remember reading it over again. Then again. I had never heard anything like this. It was supposed to be hard to get to Heaven and Emeth had just…stumbled in.
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A Psalm for the Wild-Built
Years later, thinking back on the book, this was the only passage I remembered with any clarity. Not the unicorn, or the grand battle at the end, not the donkey in a lion’s skin. Just Emeth, surprised and pleased to find himself in Heaven. Just because he had tried—as much as he was able—to do the right thing in life and to find what was true.
In fact, Emeth’s name is a Hebrew word for truth (אֱמֶת).
This is the scene that is often brought up when people are wondering if Lewis was a Christian universalist (subscribing to the belief that God will eventually save everyone). Lewis liked the idea—he wasn’t a huge fan of the idea of Hell—but ultimately couldn’t bring himself to believe it.
Lewis talks about this in The Problem of Pain:
“Some will not be redeemed. There is no doctrine which I would more willingly remove from Christianity than this, if it lay in my power. But it has the full support of Scripture and, specially, of Our Lord’s own words; it has always been held by Christendom; and it has the support of reason.”
Like it or not, then, there was only one way to Heaven: through Jesus. But, Lewis points out in Mere Christianity, “But the truth is God has not told us what His arrangement about the other people are. We do know that no man can be saved except through Christ; we do not know that only those who know Him can be saved through Him.”
I’m not the only one to be taken aback by Lewis’s inclusivity. He got letters asking him about it. People wanted to know more about what he meant, that an unbeliever could enter in Heaven. He talked about it in a few of his letters, so here are a couple examples:
I think that every prayer which is sincerely made even to a false god or to a very imperfectly conceived true God, is accepted by the true God and that Christ saves many who do not think they know Him. For He is (dimly) present in the good side of the inferior teachers they follow. In the parable of the Sheep and Goats those who are saved not seem to know that there have served Christ. But of course our anxiety about unbelievers is most usefully employed when it leads us not to speculation but to earnest prayer for them and the attempt to be in our own lives such good advertisements for Christianity as will make it attractive.
And, more directly in reference to Emeth:
The world does not consist of 100 per cent Christians and 100 per cent non-Christians. There are people (a great many of them) who are slowly ceasing to be Christians but who still call themselves by that name: some of them are clergymen. There are other people who are slowly becoming Christian though they do not yet call themselves so. There are people who do not accept the full Christian doctrine about Christ but who are so strongly attracted by Him that they are His in a much deeper sense than they themselves understand. There are people in other religions who are being led by God’s secret influence to concentrate on those parts of their religion which are in agreement with Christianity, and who thus belong to Christ without knowing it.
For me, reading The Last Battle as a kid was the beginning of a new way of looking at God. What if God wasn’t the terrifying tyrant just waiting to shovel people into Hell? What if God wasn’t some cosmic lawyer reading the fine print to find ways to disqualify people? What if, instead, God was like Aslan…someone who loved me. Someone who was generous and kind and forgiving and of course wanting as many people (and animals and dryads and giants) as possible to be in the heavenly kingdom of Narnia-to-come?
Not that all my fear immediately left me, but I found myself asking over and over, “What if it’s C.S. Lewis who is right, and not the people at my school, and not the people at my church?”
There’s a lot more that could be unpacked here, and as an adult I have some complicated feelings and complicated theologies that we don’t need to go into here. There are so many ways that The Last Battle is my least favorite of the Narnia books. I hate what’s done to Susan here. I hate the way the dwarves talk to Emeth, and I hate that Lewis didn’t seem to truly understand the depth of feelings we might experience when he literally killed everyone in the end.
But there’s this other piece—this piece right here—that makes The Last Battle my favorite. It’s the book that untied this knot in me—this unhealthy, evil knot—that said that Aslan was to be followed because he was fearsome and powerful and that bold punishments await those who do not do as he says.
This is the book that taught me that the so-called followers of Aslan who are cruel and unkind, who seek power, build kingdoms for themselves and harm their fellow citizens—even if they do it in the name of Aslan—are in fact offering their vile deeds to someone or something else. That those who are good and kind and trying to do what is right and seeking truth—even if they hold to a different theology—might be on the right path after all.
This is the book that taught me to stop worrying so much and just get to know Aslan.
This is the book that reminds me that if God is good, and loving, and just, and merciful, that it may well be—in fact, must surely be—that he isn’t capricious or cruel about how eternity works.
So I’m thankful for The Last Battle and I’m thankful for Emeth. It’s a theological lesson that I got as a child that I’m still thinking about, still mulling over. And it fills me with both relief and joy to think that when we each make our way through that stable at the world’s end, that—even if “the name of Aslan was hateful” to us—if we have been doing our best to find truth, to do the right thing, to care for the people around us, that we can expect to be greeted by a lion as big as an elephant, fast as an ostrich, with eyes bright as liquid gold in a furnace, beautiful and terrible. And whether we fall down or bury our faces in his mane we can expect to hear that deep and glorious voice say, “Child, thou art welcome.”
Matt Mikalatos is the author of the YA fantasy The Crescent Stone. You can follow him on Twitter or connect on Facebook.
What you wrote here resonates with my own experience from a different angle. I was raised in an evangelical Lutheran congregation: “We are beggars. That is true. Alleluia!” I think I was bolstered against infection by the cruelty of mostly-recent mostly-American mostly-Protestant Christian thought because at that church we read a lot of C.S. Lewis.
Another of those ideas got some thoughtful treatment from the pulpit and in teenage Sunday school: that the Bible must be 100 percent easy to understand on first reading by everyone in exactly the same way or else either the people who disagree are stupid/evil/ignorant or the Bible is not true. Actually, my teachers said, the people who wrote down the Bible were like reflecting pools. A clear, serene pool may reflect perfectly. But does it reflect the entire sky? So, said someone, St. Paul himself had to sit down and fan himself and drink a glass of wine before walking into Heaven, because the minute he got there he realized how much he had gotten wrong. And so will all of us. And that’s okay. It’s the converse of “Emeth goes to Heaven too.”
a comment that made me think of Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor in the Brothers Karamazov *
*my iPad’s autocorrect thinks that should have been Bothers Kalamazoo, a work by the great Russian author that I should be most interested to read.
Ah, I see you were also a scrupulous (my religion even has a name for this phenomenon ;) ) child!
I have had different levels of confidence/doubt and relationships with God througout my life, but nearing 40 I definitely am in the ‘we’re all muddling along in the half-light’ camp.
I have been reading Tor for years, thinking and commenting about YA fiction, super heroes, Star Trek, and many more topics besides.
This is almost certainly one of the greatest and most thought-provoking posts to grace the site.
Thank you.
Emeth was a huge comfort to me as well as a kid growing up in a mixed-religion family.
I’ve always been a pushover for stories of villains becoming “good” and stories of “good” people who begin life in a group of villains or monsters and then join the group of heroes. So I loved Emeth’s experience, back when I thought Aslan was an embodiment of goodness and kindness, who occasionally played the role of Jesus in Bible-inspired plots but was mostly his own lion. After learning that Aslan was intended to be Jesus, I got much more uncomfortable with the implications that all good people in the world are actually Christians even if we think we have another religion or none. It reminds me of the time in high school when my gentle Fundamentalist Christian friend, who knew I was Jewish, cornered me and urged me to convert to Christianity so I would go to Heaven like her. I believe she sincerely wanted to save me and continue our friendship after death, but I was frightened and angry, and I tense up in fight-or-flight mode thinking about it now. I told her later that I believed I wouldn’t go to Hell after all I did to protect God’s creations (as an environmentalist), and she accepted that but may or may not have believed it. Now I see I was claiming to be like Emeth, and may have been subconsciously influenced by his story.
The dwarves also came to feel like a personal warning — atheists who had been spared the Devil’s wrath and sent to Heaven, but couldn’t or wouldn’t realize it and were thus trapped forever in a dark, dank little space of their own mental making.
Lewis’s ideology was what it was, and I’m glad it impacted other people so positively. But with the background I bring to it, I can’t like these parts of it.
(And even as a child, I hated that most of the characters existed forever in unimaginable and ever-growing bliss, because I’ve always been envy-prone and did not see that situation as a vision of what my own afterlife could be. And I was indignant that the world and adventures I had loved were narratively diminished as a mere prelude to the characters’ story, again not connecting with the framing of life as a prelude to a more important afterlife. )
Thank you for this. I spent so many of my formative years trying to understand how to hold the theology of The Last Battle in one hand, and that of The Great Divorce in the other. Really appreciated this insight.
@1/Jenny Islander. I love that! Thank you for sharing.
@2/silenos. That’s a work I’d love to read. :D
@3/Lisamarie. I’ve never heard that term before, and I looked it up and found a whole lot of articles about religious OCD and I was like, whoa, that’s pretty close to my experience.
@4/Joe. What a kind and gracious comment. Thank you very much, I am so thankful you would take the time to say that.
@5/Julie. Thank you for sharing your story. That makes perfect sense, but I hadn’t even thought of that.
@6/AeronaGreenjoy. Thank you so much for sharing. I can see 100% what you are saying, and I debated including a paragraph about the sort of troubling colonialist mindset of, “All the good people in other religions actually agree with me they just don’t know it” but I realized that wasn’t my experience until I was an adult. But I am so thankful you shared it here. Lewis was particularly hard on skeptics and atheists because he was the former and had been the latter. As for the ever-increasing bliss of the new Narnia(s), Lewis was pretty heavily influenced by Charles Williams and his neo-Platonism here, and I think he would have only said in reply that it wasn’t about in increase in bliss (for Lewis) but rather about becoming more and more one’s self… about moving toward the Platonic ideal of what each person and place and thing was meant to be. That idea of the constant transformation of the self in the afterlife would have just been a natural extension of Lewis’s belief that life in general is simply that… evolution or devolution, never static. Anyway, I suspect that if Lewis were around today he would resonate with your comment and encourage that continued commitment toward being true to one’s self that seems so clear in the stories you shared here.
@7/Cy. We’ll get to The Great Divorce for sure, and it is very interesting to see how Lewis deals with heaven and hell when he’s talking about them more-or-less directly.
@1, I like the metaphor of the pool reflecting the sky, different pools can reflect different parts of the sky and each is just as valid and just as incomplete as others. Lewis’s theology definitely seem to be that Christianity is more true, more valid than others, just as Narnia’s god is more true than Calormen’s, and it’s not even about nomenclature and language, Aslan doesn’t have another name in Calormen, he doesn’t appear in a form that is familiar to Emeth according to his religious beliefs, even though theoretically he could, since he appeared as a lamb at the end of Dawn Treader. It’s also notable that Aslan wakes up Time and begins the end of the world just after Narnia was conquered.
All the metaphysics and theology aside, I just want that looking up into those burning gold eyes, feeling my hands on the silky mane, and hearing the deep, rich comforting voice. Is loving Aslan not enough?
This was the part of The Last Battle I always remembered best too, and took it as tenet of faith. I was at an entirely different place on the religious spectrum- raised Quaker in a congregation in a liberal college town- but I knew that every polytheist tradition I read about seemed to have much better stories and more interesting gods than monotheism. This told me I could love all the gods I wanted to love and it would all come back to the Lion in the end, and the Lion was far more compelling to me than Christ.
When I was reading The Last Battle as a non-Christian kid, I nearly threw away the book in disgust when I came across this passage:
I understand and accept that most English books (Narnia book more than most) are written with a heavy Christian-slant, but this was jarring. Lion Jesus is unwaveringly a force of Good and any evil done in his name is actually done in the name of the Allah / Satan amalgamation. And vice versa.
This was my favourite part of The Last Battle as well, and helped shape a lot of my ideas about heaven.
@4/Joe: I agree, this is perhaps the best article I have read in Tor.com, and it does mirror some of my thoughts as a kid. I was raised as a Catholic. My parents were quite casual about religion, though. They took me to mass on Sunday and little else. And I attended a Jesuit school. Jesuits have always been rather enlightened in their approach to religion and humanism. In religion class, for example, we were told that the Bible was inspired by God, not dictated by God, and therefore was written through the cultural perspective and understanding of the people who wrote the different books, and that studying that cultural and historical context helped us in the quest to differentiate the human perspective of the writers from the Divine message underneath. We were also taught that a lot of it was allegorical religious writing, and not a science or history book, so there was no conflict with scientific theories like evolution, for example. The biblical tale about Adan and Eve was an allegory, telling how God had created us and how as we found reason we lost our innocence and became capable of sin, not a literal statement that we were all descended from two people called Adan and Eve who lived a few millennia ago…
I never really believed in God myself, not even as a small child, being too sceptic and rational for faith, and sometimes I idly thought about whether that meant I was to go to Hell, if in fact God existed as taught by religion. Those thoughts were not that urgent for me, since I did not believe in the first place, but my conclusion was that if indeed God existed and loved us as Christian religion said, then He would not condemn us to eternal punishment just for having a rational mind (rational mind that He would have given us, in the first place). That the obsession with faith was just a way for churches to expand and control people, and that if God existed and was so eager for us to believe that, He could easily give us proof of his existence. And therefore, being a good person and treating people well was more important than your religious beliefs.
This was a beautiful article. While reading it I cried, remembering how beautiful that passage was and how impactful it had been for me the first time I read it years ago.
I’m not a Christian myself, not anymore. I still do love most of Jesus’s own teachings. Not all of them, some I find less than good, but most go straight to the heart, to the point my talking of them to others, updated to current events, has helped some to convert into Christianity. As for myself, I found comfort in Eastern religiosity, particularly in Buddhism, which has its own share of heartwarming tales, stories and parables.
I hope someday Christians will leave Hell-based fear theologies behind, fully embracing its hopeful side with its call for all to seek truth, as truth frees. Lewis himself couldn’t do that despite his heart telling him that was the path, and so he, as so many before him, rationalized the contradiction away to justify the unjustifiable. And yet, how close he got!
Let’s hope most may one day take that step.
@15: not all Christians, I think – I recall being told by a Greek Orthodox believer that according to their tradition, Hell would be empty at the Last Day. The same person also suggested that since Heaven exists outside Time, we would all enter Heaven at the same moment, so no-one sits in eternal bliss contemplating the suffering of those left behind. Though not a believer, both of these seemed more aesthetically satisfying than the more conventional Western theology I had heard
@12
I came from a very christian household (although I am now very much an aetheist), but even when I read this as a young teen, it seemed to me a simple cynical appropriation of another culture. But isn’t that first-millenia christianity in a nutshell? So many ‘saints’ of Europe are thinly-veiled non-abrahamic goddesses and gods who were appropriated by christianity by the conquering culture. This seems to be just another chapter in the long line of deities and supernatural entities that the christian church has re-tooled into a catholic narrative – simply business as usual.
Getting back to the matter at hand, I enjoyed the very end of The Last Battle, but the philosophical, narrative and mental gymnastics I had to jump through to get there through the novel made me re-evaluate the whole Narnian cycle, even as a young teen. In retrospect, in fact, it may have began my journey of questioning the religion I had been brought up in. Oh, the irony…
@16: Another current of Orthodox Christian theology teaches that we are all headed for the same place: unfiltered proximity to God. People who journey through their lives “falling down and getting up” (to quote an Orthodox writer) become stronger thereby and experience God’s presence as beautiful, life-giving light. People who insist that they never fall down, or who enjoy tripping other people, weaken themselves thereby and experience God’s presence as, in a word, Hellfire.
Religious trauma can be quite serious, and there’s therapy for it.
@16: That’s a quite heterodox orthodox Christian. :-) Orthodox Christianity is more mystical and way less theological than its Western counterpart(s), but it still believes the majority of people will end up suffering. The difference is in the postulated mechanism for, as @18 alluded to.
@18: Yep, that’s the Orthodox doctrine of the “Divine Light”. It doesn’t teaches that Hell is a place of torture sinful souls are consigned to, rather, it sees Hell as a state of being sinful souls experience even amidst saved souls. The idea is that the Christian God continuously emanates a spiritual light that permeates reality, without which reality itself wouldn’t exist as that very light is what keeps things existing. Souls aligned towards him have by an act of will chosen to experience that light as perpetual, blissful, lovely warmth, while souls aligned in opposition to him have, also by an act of will, chosen to experience that light as an also perpetual, painful, burning fire, with God himself would be doing nothing to cause the later effect, as he’s just emanating existence as always.
I think this notion is much nicer than the Western idea of Hell as a place God forces sinful souls into to then actively torture them forever and ever as a means to show his Divine Justice in action. But “nicer” doesn’t mean “good”, as in this depiction God, while not an active sadist, is still conniving with boatloads of people continuously being burned alive, even though he has the power to protect them from the pain-inducing effects of his own light.
This plays into the actual criticism I have towards Christian morality. I call this “the problem of the two morals”. To sum it up greatly, what happens is that Christianity teaches one moral for the short amount of time people are alive, characterized by loving one’s enemies, doing charity for those in need, alleviating others’ pains, being humble etc. And then it teaches a second, completely different, and even opposite moral for the perpetual afterlife, characterized by enjoying (or at the very least ignoring) one’s enemies’ suffering, refusing to do any charity towards those in need, shrugging before others’ pain, feeling superior to and looking down at those who have nothing while they themselves have everything, and so on and so forth. All with the detail that the “moral for death” is thought of as the definitive one, valid for millions, billions, trillions of years, while the “moral for life” is required for only about 80 years or so, which over time will asymptotically amount to a mere 0.0000…00001% of one’s existence.
That’s the crux of the problem for me. Were Christianity teaching the first moral only, I’d think it pretty okay, and admirable even. But the moment it adds the second, and place it as the definitive one, that’s when, for me, it turns bad.
@16/18 – I am definitely starting to lean towards that myself, in part because of the way I view my own children and if God is truly a perfected version of parenthood then I think he would outdo me in mercy/grace. There are parts of Great Divorce (which I read many years ago so I’m very fuzzy on the details) that I’d probably take the ‘wrong’ side on ;)
@20: I think it’s an attempt to resolve the paradox of free will in a universe that is created and maintained by an omni-[multiple adjectives here] God. If people are always free to choose to either accept or reject God, then they are also free to endure the consequences either way.
Lewis’s metaphor in The Great Divorce is of a vast emptiness full of people so obsessed with whatever they don’t want to let go that they won’t accept the chance to move from Hell to Heaven when it’s offered to them (although some eventually do). Among the recently dead, this emptiness is like a dreary, ill-maintained town where nothing much ever happens or at least not for long. The people who have devoted a lot of subjective time to insisting that no, really, they’re fine live alone further out, like asteroids in interplanetary darkness. But even they are free to get on the metaphorical bus to the border of Heaven. (And when they get there, they discover that their vast realm is so tiny in comparison to Heaven that a sparrow could swallow it by accident, and their great obsessions are, in general, trivial.)
I think they are both fruitful metaphors, but where I disagree with both Lewis and Orthodox Christianity is in the assertion that sooner or later the buses from Hell to Heaven will stop running. If you’re in a realm–either realm–that operates outside the time-afflicted part of our cosmos, then why should Hell ever be locked? There may well be somebody who has always done their duty, or won’t give up the illusion of power, or can’t admit that they made a mistake, and therefore refuses to ever get on the bus or accept that God’s light can be pleasant. But that doesn’t mean that there’s a deadline for everybody else.
@@@@@ Matt, I’m sorry you were terrorized by people who, by their own lights, meant you nothing but good. A sadly common problem when one reads the history of Christianity, at least. And I’m glad the the book helped lift the burden of fear imposed on you.
“For He is (dimly) present in the good side of the inferior teachers they follow.” As I get older, I suspect more and more that Lewis got it backwards: that the good is found in many stories, rather than one that is “truer” than all the others.
Seeing the wonderful heartfelt and spiritually honest writing about Narnia appearing on TOR, it is very easy to see this as a 21st Century internet version of . “I tell you that if these should keep silent, the stones would immediately cry out.”
@@@@@ 0, Matt Mikalatos:
James Boswell—of Boswell and Johnson fame—had an uncle named John. John Boswell was a member of the Glasites. They were a Christian sect founded by John Glas. Their basic tenet is inscribed on Glases tombstone:
That the bare death of Jesus Christ without a thought or deed on the part of man, is sufficient to present the chief of sinners spotless before God.
Uncle John took this to mean he could get away with anything. Which he did, in numerous bawdy houses. Presumably with his soul as spotless as ever.
To be fair, the Glasites excommunicated him.
I had a friend who was brought up as a child in a convent and treated cruelly. The last battle was a relief to read about Emeth I loved it. God looks on the heart and our motives. Iv read stories about children brought up in orphanages in Moldova and other places. Terrible cruelty and neglect. I heard that a cruel leader used some of these as his guards when they grew up as they had no feelings due to the cruelty and lack of love. So there is a lot in life that is no way clear cut. I do have faith in a God who loves me. If he looks on the heart he sees everything. Good to read others thinking. I think some believers are dogmatic on their thinking. God is bigger than we can ever understand. I hate the hell thing. I know two books that are completely opposite written by well loved and spirit filled people. One is fire and brimstone the other is annihilation. We only see in part…. thank you for your story how The Last Battle helped you. It helped me as well when I have heard about cruelty by those who professed Christ. And equally people I know and those who follow another faith but are the loveliest of people.
Lewis’s theology with Emeth is roughly that of the Catholic Church: non Christians can be saved, but salvation comes from Christ. The Church recognizes what is true in other religions and Islam gets a special mention. This was also roughly the view of Lewis’s own Church, the Church of England, in his time, though even then Anglicans didn’t go in for detailed official statements of doctrine much.
The point that, conversely, evil done for God is actually done for Satan, is discussed by Lewis somewhere. He commented that “devil worship” in the form of worshipping what is consciously realized to be evil is rare, what is more common is attributing evil to God and praising that. I will leave you to think of your own examples.
For many people the Emeth incident is the most memorable part of the book. If this isn’t too much of an anticlimax, I’m reminded of the Imperial officer in The Empire Strikes Back who says “I will assume full responsibility, and apologize to Lord Vader” – even in the evil Empire there are people who will sacrifice themselves to protect their subordinates.
On first read, I wondered if C.S. was going for a sort of “universalist moment” with Emeth, but as I read on, I found the interaction idescribably beautiful. And as I’ve said before, I don’t believe the sentiment was that all good people of any religion are going to the Christian heaven. But rather, those who seek Truth find it, and only Aslan knows who is truly seeking Him.
And as for hell, I’ll admit that it is the most troubling and difficult theology to unpack. I tend to agree with what I understand C.S was illustrating with the Dwarves; that God’s heart is for all to be redeemed, but it is up to them to accept that redemption. He doesn’t *want* to send anyone to hell. But the Dwarves completely rejected Aslan. They seem to have quite literally damned themselves.
The other troublesome bit of theology is that those in “paradise” wouldn’t care about those in eternal suffering. I truly think the children cared a great deal about Susan, but in Aslan’s country, there was nothing more they could do but trust her soul to Him. (And I do believe she made it there herself.)The thing is, if one can’t experience worry or pain in God’s presence, then how could they be concerned with the “others”? The time for one to agonize over lost souls is in this life when they still have the chance to do something about it. In eternity, one must trust God to sort it out. Thinking about Aslan shaped my belief here, that if we trust Him to be perfect in all things, then His justice is perfect. He will handle things correctly. And there are many theories to that that we simply can’t know here, everything from different levels of punishment to portions of scripture’s hell descriptions being symbolic. Some things are beyond our understanding, but we can trust beyond anything that our King is Good.
@@@@@ 29:
That Susan isn’t there with them (yet) was apparently a sequel hook for a book that never got written after all: Susan was meant to have her own book describing how she got to join them. So if that had worked out, nothing “worse” would have happened to Susan in the end except that Lewis felt she deserved her story to be told at length.
Lewis later stated in a letter that she would get there “in her own time”. Sadly, writing that book never worked out, so that call forward is left hanging without a resolution.
Exactly what she had the falling out with her family over also isn’t meant to be quite what it sounds like, either. There are tons of strong, female characters in the series – who are generally all more courageous, smarter, and better at overall planning and problem solving than the boys (even though fairy tales generally protrayed those traits as masculine); while still being more compassionate and better with people (traditionally considered to be feminine in stories). So it’s not the author who is misogynistic when it comes to Susan – rather: she is quite desperately looking for her place in life (there are even hints she may be depressed in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader); and obsessing over her (warped and misconceived!) teenage notions of what it means to be “a woman” is one of the ways this shows. It’s not as if there never was a teenager before who acted especially “grown up” (and widely missed the mark due to blindness blindness) to prove they were no longer a kid… Which is why Polly says she wished Susan would grow up already; not because of the details of the thing involving what Susan sees as hyper-femininity.
All in all, more than enough for its own book – that sadly never came to be.