There is a common belief that C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia is a surreptitious effort to get children to accept Jesus Christ as their personal Lord and Savior under the auspices of a Lion. I never quite bought into that, seems too trite.
For his part Lewis always insisted that Aslan is not an allegory of Jesus, which is a pretty cheeky thing to say about a fictional god who dies and rises from the dead. Despite Lewis’ protestations we can safely assume that the lion is in fact an allegory of Christ. But which Christ? Is it the modern American commercial Christ? The Coco-Cola Santa Christ? The Jesus-is-my-boyfriend Christ of American Evangelicalism? No, none of these. Aslan is the Logos, which we’ll describe as the creative and ordering principle of the Cosmos.
Lewis had a lot to say about the Logos in his philosophical essay The Abolition of Man which argues that modern education with its materialist presuppositions makes it impossible for people to act in a virtuous way: if you teach young people that their instincts for goodness, nobility and beauty are nothing other than projections with no basis in objective reality, they will eventually be unable to act in a good, noble or beautiful way. He builds his argument up to the conclusion that what the victims of modern education are ultimately incapable of is perceiving and participating in the Logos, that organizing principle of the Cosmos.
For Lewis, a person who sees a tree as a grouping of chemical reactions and hydraulics is further from the truth than a person who imagines the tree is inhabited by a Nyad. The child who believes in Santa Claus is closer to reality than the child who believes Santa is pure bunk. Because they are closer to the truth, they are more capable of acting in reality, as they are participating more in the Logos.
Eustace Clarence Scrub has to be disabused of his modern education before he can act like a normal boy; Lucy and Aslan destroy the anti-fairy tale Telmarine education system; Aslan personally visits England so he can terrorize the principal of Jill’s progressive school.
This is tied into my assertion that The Chronicles of Narnia can be read as mid-century dystopian fiction like 1984 and Brave New World. In most of the novels the evil to be defeated is a regime of lies. And that was what Lewis probably saw himself as doing: freeing children’s minds from official lies so they can participate in the Logos of the world.
Truth and Tolerance 