Narnia Unfinished
Donald T. Williams on What Lewis Captured & Failed to Capture
I have a friend, one of the most intelligent and sensitive readers I know, who reads C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia every year. She dreads coming to The Last Battle though, because she does not find its happy ending quite strong enough to compensate for the horror of what is done to Narnia by its Anti-Christs (the fake Aslan and then Tash) and False Prophet (Shift). The hollow pain in her chest still lingers even after she comes to Aslan’s Country and to the title page of the real Story that goes on forever and each chapter of which is better than the last. Not every Narnian tear, she feels, is quite wiped away.
I don’t fully agree with my friend, but I can sympathize. The destruction of Narnia is hard to take, and the eucatastrophe on the other side of the Stable Door is only just enough to counterbalance it in my own reading. But “only just” is hardly sufficient, when Scripture promises that the sufferings of this life are not worthy to be compared to the glory that is to be revealed (Rom. 8:18).
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Donald T. Williams is Professor Emeritus of Toccoa Falls College. He stays permanently camped out on the borders between serious scholarship and pastoral ministry, between theology and literature, and between Narnia and Middle-Earth. He is the author of fourteen books, including Answers from Aslan: The Enduring Apologetics of C. S. Lewis (DeWard, 2023). He is a contributing editor of Touchstone.
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