I wrote:Exploring ‘The Last Battle’s’ Emeth ElementEvery once in a while I catch myself having oddball thoughts about either
The Chronicles of Narnia or their author, C.S. Lewis. Such notions as these come not from any logical basis, but a rather reflexive attitude toward something like the
Chronicles or Lewis’s other works, including
Mere Christianity and
The Great Divorce, that have proven to be so awesome yet so popular:
How could anything be so awesome and yet so popular at the same time? There must be Something Wrong with it. Something about Narnia or Lewis’s nonfiction is actually un-Biblical and that’s why people like it so much. After all, Biblical things aren’t supposed to be popular.I think that subconscious suspicion may be behind how many people react to a certain controversial portion of Lewis’s last Chronicle of Narnia,
The Last Battle. This has often come up in the
Narnia and Christianity section of the NarniaWeb forum (where I’m a moderator). People worry about it: Lewis’s portrayal of a young and “pagan” Calormene man who somehow finds his way into Aslan’s (the
Chronicles’ Christ-figure’s) country and the heavenly New Narnia.
Just this weekend, “Rilian” (NarniaWeb’s “podcasting prince”) and I recorded
an hour-long session for the site in which we discussed what I’ve come to call The Emeth Element. It was an excellent interchange; I learned a lot, and I look forward to listeners’ responses!
We began with reading excerpts from
The Last Battle itself, in which the character Emeth, a young man who had earlier been showed as being fully devoted to the false god — though very real and evil entity — Tash. Calling the bluff of a deception coordinated by Narnia’s false prophet Shift, and the evil Calormene, Rishda Tarkaan, Emeth enters the mysterious Stable, slays an enemy, and finds himself not in a small dirty wooden hut, but a wondrous paradise that (somehow) Aslan has set up and which can be entered by passing through the Stable door.
Later, Emeth tells other humans — the Seven Friends of Narnia — how he encountered Aslan.
“Then I fell at [Aslan’s] feet and thought, Surely this is the hour of death, for the Lion (who is worthy of all honour) will know that I have served Tash all my days and not him. Nevertheless, it is better to see the Lion and die than to be Tisroc of the world and live and not to have seen him. But the Glorious One bent down his golden head and touched my forehead with his tongue and said, ‘Son, thou art welcome.’ But I said, ‘Alas, Lord, I am no son of thine but the servant of Tash.’ He answered, ‘Child, all the service thou hast done to Tash, I account as service done to me. Then by reasons of my great desire for wisdom and understanding, I overcame my fear and questioned the Glorious One and said, Lord, is it then true, as the Ape said, that thou and Tash are one? The Lion growled so that the earth shook (but his wrath was not against me) and said, It is false. Not because he and I are one, but because we are opposites, I take to me the services which thou hast done to him. For I and he are of such different kinds that no service which is vile can be done to me, and none which is not vile can be done to him. Therefore, if any man swear by Tash and keep his oath for the oath’s sake, it is by me that he has truly sworn, though he know it not, and it is I who reward him. And if any man do a cruelty in my name, then, though he says the name Aslan, it is Tash whom he serves and by Tash his deed is accepted. Dost thou understand, Child?’ I said, ‘Lord, thou knowest how much I understand.’ But I said also (for the truth constrained me), ‘Yet I have been seeking Tash all my days.’ ‘Beloved,’ said the Glorious One, ‘unless thy desire had been for me thou wouldst not have sought so long and so truly. For all find what they truly seek.’
“Then he breathed upon me and took away the trembling from my limbs and caused me to stand upon my feet. And after that, he said not much, but that we should meet again, and I must go further up and further in. Then he turned him about in a storm and flurry of gold and was gone suddenly.”
Is universalism underlying?For many people — including myself in the past — this jumps out. How could a non-Narnian, a follower of a false religion, find himself in Heaven and accepted by Aslan? It seems readers can have, and have had, three different reactions in response to this:
- C.S. Lewis wasn’t
all that orthodox and Biblical, and this is one of those portions of his writings that shows we ought not trust him to uphold Scriptural truth. Throw them out.
- The author, who was not a trained theologian, messed up in this instance. We ought to read the
Chronicles with discernment and look past the portions that might be in error.
- Lewis in this portion of the story did
not promote Universalism, and is in fact trying to say something else that doesn’t specifically relate to salvation or even Emeth’s “faith.”
Some people take the first option — among them some
very poorly designed and
argued websites that yell about Lewis not having a specific prayed-the-prayer “salvation experience” or the resemblance of Mr. Tumnus to imagined physical features of the Devil. But they number very few, and are certainly — and rightfully — in Christendom’s minority today.
And as for the second option, yes, Lewis might have been error, though not because of belief in Universalism (as I’ll explain below). NarniaWeb member The Black Glove pointed out in
a September post that some questionable medieval theology did inform Lewis’s worldview. Apparently that mindset includes the concept of a “noble pagan” who isn't so terrible, so he doesn't necessarily go to Hell, but not to Heaven either — such as in Dante’s
Divine Comedy, which shows Greek philosophers such as Plato and Socrates in some kind of in-between place. If Lewis meant that, we can politely disagree, and enjoy the rest of the story.
Yet I take the third option for the Emeth Element listed above — Lewis was not in error here.
Yes, it’s very true that Lewis was not a trained theologian, and he would be have been the first to say so (it’s safe to assume that by
now he is surely a trained theologian!). For example, in
The Problem of Pain, Lewis not only misunderstood the concept of “total depravity,” but made up a creation story for
our world, trying to guess how “early man” would have become aware of God yet somehow sinned and paying no attention to the Garden of Eden story. (Lewis has more respect for the Creation account in
The Space Trilogy than he did in this “nonfiction”!) And one might venture to say that even the story of Aslan sacrificing himself to save Edmund in
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe must be carefully read, for
the sacrifice is almost to appease the Witch’s “wrath”, not the wrath of the Narnian Emperor-over-the-Sea (God).
Yet overall Lewis imbued the
Narnia stories with such a sense of the “awful yet beautiful” nature of Christ, the magic and wonder of life in Him and the redemption He gives us, that other errors are minor and not sufficient to ignore the
Chronicles, or even this part of the story.
Also, we need not count Universalism among those errors — the idea that God will save all people, or most people, regardless of whether they believed in Christ in this world. Lewis’s rejection of this idea can be clearly seen just from the rest of
The Last Battle itself. Before Aslan has ended the first Narnia and forever closed the Stable door on a world that is now dark and cold, a horde of creatures comes running to the door, in a picture of the Judgment Seat of Christ. Two different reactions, fear and love, take place in the good creatures. But others look at him with loathing, then turn aside into darkness. The narrator explains their fate is unknown. Yet one can safely surmise that the evil false god Tash, Rishda, Ginger the cat, Shift the Ape and thousands of other creatures clearly went to Some Other Place.
In
The Great Divorce, another work of fiction, Lewis may have been less certain about the fate of those who have never heard of Jesus, and so translated his uncertainties into the medium of fiction. But we can see that he did not buy into Universalism. In an imagined conversation with George MacDonald in
The Great Divorce, Lewis asks the “writer” if he believes all people will be saved; and at least this fictitious MacDonald answers no, not at all. And throughout the story, Lewis, upholds the idea of Hell — though Lewis casts it metaphorically as a completely small, insignificant, dull sort of place that more resembles a ghetto than a burning lake of fire.
In his nonfiction works, too, Lewis argues against the idea that all people — or most people, without Christ — will be saved. Even in the sometimes-problematic
Problem of Pain, he specifically upholds the doctrine of Hell and God’s punishment for rebellious sinners.
“
[Hell] 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,” Lewis wrote. “If a game is played, it must be possible to lose it.”
Further up and further inSo if Lewis isn’t making a statement about how supposedly nonbelievers in Aslan can get into Heaven anyway, what is he talking about? And how are we to reconcile the seemingly clear idea that the “pagan” Emeth, who has served a false god all his life, winds up in “Heaven”?
In our podcast, Rilian related something I had not thought of before: that Aslan is not talking nearly as much about whether Emeth is “saved” as he is the concept of using Emeth’s good deeds, even if performed in the name of a false god, for the Lion’s glory. Thus, anything evil done in Aslan’s name is “credited” to Tash, and anything good done in the evil Tash’s name is credited to Aslan. And Aslan works all things for good, similar to Christ (Romans 8: 38-39). He receives glory in all things — even good deeds practiced by pagans because of
common grace (Matthew 5:45).
Meanwhile, I reiterated that just as salvation works differently for Narnians — at first, Edmund didn’t even know Aslan died for him, and Aslan did not die to save other creatures — Heaven works differently. Emeth has not quite reached Heaven; rather, he is in a limbo state, a sort of “reverse purgatory” in which he is on the way to knowing Aslan, but not quite there yet.
Later, in the joyous stampede of humans and animals alike “further up and further in,” Emeth is still not there — at least not yet. In his “limbo state” nearer the Stable Door, the young man is still “searching.”
Someday we can ask Lewis himself what he meant with the whole Emeth element. In the story, Lewis doesn’t tell us what became of him. His story ends a bit quickly, and like with the agnostic, humanistic Dwarves and the evil Rishda Tarkaan whom Tash himself abducts and then disappears, readers are left to wonder. Instead we focus on Aslan, who encourages his people to go “further up and further in.”
But I have my guess: my interpretation is that Aslan will continue to work with the noble Calormene, and show him further truths that will lead to his final “salvation” and joyous journey into Aslan’s Country, further up and further in!
If you have not listened to the podcast and don’t want it to be spoiled, I would suggest skipping the rest of my post. I liked Rilian’s theory that when people do good things they are glorifying God whether they know it or not and when they do evil they are doing what the devil would want. The comparison to the church persecuting others makes a lot of sense. (If I make any errors in my summarizing feel free to correctly.) My opinion on Rilian’s theory starts here. In Narnia / on Earth all creatures were created by “God,” so any good they do would be a credit to the creator and reflecting his goodness. Since the Creator is good and only good (he’s prefect after all), anything the creatures do that is wrong cannot reflect on him. They show the influence of evil on the creatures. I don’t think I’m explaining this very well. I hate it when my thoughts get stuck in my head and won’t come out. Also, Peter (the Biblical one) demonstrates this general idea. One minute he is saying that Jesus is the Messiah and Jesus is blessing him and telling him that he will be the rock on which the church is built. The next minute Peter says about Jesus’ being killed, “God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you.” Then Jesus says to him, “Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; for you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.” Within seven verses, Peter has gone from being compared to a useful rock to being compared to a stumbling block. When he does what is right, he is reflecting what the Father in Heaven revealed to him but when he is doing what is wrong he is called Satan and is reflecting human things instead of divine things. (Matthew 16:16-23)
I meant how to insert links.