On Mon, 25 Nov 2002, David Rodemaker wrote: [Mark M.] #> Well, yeah. Except that for Lewis, the Christian mythos is absolutely #> true about the universe. The fair question, as I see it, is: Did Lewis #> expect the series to hit people this way, or could he reasonably have #> expected it to? And if so, how did he feel about it? -- Not necessarily #> questions we can answer. # #The same argument could be made about LOTR, it's certainly as Christian as #Narnia is... Distinguo (as somebody quotes Lewis as typically saying to Tolkien, a term from their student debating days): I disagree. Narnia has the same Christ as our world (in the Christian view), and the betrayal, sacrifice, and resurrection, reenacted in different form in another world, all presented as illustration of the Christian story as Christians believe it to have occurred in our world. Tolkien's Middle-earth certainly has "the character who is never named and always present", as some critic has put it; that is, God. But unlike some, I do not see a particularly forceful Christian symbolism in such themes as loss (Frodo's finger), giving up something so that others may have it (Frodo's departure), or resurrection (Gandalf). To me, at least, these are universal tropes; they are all there in the soup of story, to borrow an image from Tolkien's essay "On fairy stories" (I may have the title wrong), and they are certainly not combined to form a presentation of the Christian story in anything like the way Lewis does it. Someone may have made a convincing demonstration somewhere that these elements do make a Christian theme in LotR... but even if that argument can be made, nobody has to do that for Lewis! He puts his Christian story together right on stage under the spotlights and thrusts it in your face. #The argument can be made that both T. and L. were Christian mystics (not in #the occult sense but in the religious one) I'll agree with that. # and were quite aware of what they were doing. That, too, but IMHO they weren't at all doing the same thing, in Christian terms. -- Mark A. Mandel