Secular Narnia
In this issue, Rebecca Sicree recalls some delightful misunderstandings of C. S. Lewis’s Narnia books that occurred among her small children, both when she read the books aloud as well as when the children read them on their own. Mrs. Sicree’s reminiscences brought to my mind a young lady in a graduate class I taught ten years ago. She asked if her term paper might consider the influence of the Elizabethan poet Edmund Spenser on the Narnia books, which she had read and loved as a child. It was an unconventional topic for an M.A. program, but I acquiesced because I thought that she would learn more and write better on an original subject about which she cared (and this proved to be the case).
In the course of our discussions about the paper, my student revealed that she had also enjoyed the trilogy, His Dark Materials (1995–2000), by Philip Pullman (1946–). When I asked her if she found disconcerting the clash between Lewis’s Christian symbolism and Pullman’s atheism, she was nonplussed. She had missed both the Christian significance of the Narnia books and the atheist implications of Pullman’s books, which many critics see as a calculated rebuke to Lewis.
For a moment, I was surprised that a bright student in a master’s program in English had failed to recognize the opposed religious implications of these children’s books, even upon reconsidering them as an adult, but I ought to have anticipated her obliviousness. This is an ominous sign of the times. Rebecca Sicree’s children have their mother to provide a Christian context. Our public culture has been so thoroughly drained of Christian meaning and imagery, however, that Christianity is invisible to most men and women of my student’s generation.
R. V. Young is Professor of English Emeritus at North Carolina State University, a former editor of Modern Age: A Quarterly Review, and the author of Shakespeare and the Idea of Western Civilization (Catholic University of America Press, 2022). He and his wife are parishioners at St. Ignatius of Antioch Church in Tarpon Springs, Florida. They have five grown children, fifteen grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren. He is a senior editor of Touchstone.
Get six issues (one year) of Touchstone PLUS full online access including pdf downloads for only $39.95. That's only $3.34 per month!
Get a one-year full-access subscription to the Touchstone online archives for only $19.95. That's only $1.66 per month!
bulk subscriptions
Order Touchstone subscriptions in bulk and save $10 per sub! Each subscription includes 6 issues of Touchstone plus full online access to touchstonemag.com—including archives, videos, and pdf downloads of recent issues for only $29.95 each! Great for churches or study groups.
Transactions will be processed on a secure server.
more on C. S. Lewis from the online archives
26.1—Jan/Feb 2013
The Alternate & Alternative Worlds of H. P. Lovecraft & C. S. Lewis by C. R. Wiley
30.6—Nov/Dec 2017
on C. S. Lewis, Brideshead Revisited & the Middle Things by Ben Reinhard
more from the online archives
29.4—July/August 2016
Russell Kirk: American Conservative by Bradley J. Birzer by Hunter Baker
33.2—March/April 2020
on How Bodily Resurrection Informs Social Justice by W. Ross Blackburn
calling all readers
Please Donate
"There are magazines worth reading but few worth saving . . . Touchstone is just such a magazine."
—Alice von Hildebrand
"Here we do not concede one square millimeter of territory to falsehood, folly, contemporary sentimentality, or fashion. We speak the truth, and let God be our judge. . . . Touchstone is the one committedly Christian conservative journal."
—Anthony Esolen, Touchstone senior editor
