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.

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more on C. S. Lewis from the online archives

18.3—April 2005

Lions of Succession

on Being a Free Narnian & the Joy of Subordination by Donald T. Williams

33.6—Nov/Dec 2020

Till We Have Faces Covered

on Masking the Human Countenance by Devin O'Donnell

30.6—Nov/Dec 2017

Odious & Deplorable

on C. S. Lewis, Brideshead Revisited & the Middle Things by Ben Reinhard


more from the online archives

14.1—January/February 2001

Fatherhood Uprooted

A Sociologist Looks at Fatherlessness & Its Causes by David Blankenhorn

8.4—Fall 1995

The Demise of Biblical Preaching

Distortions of the Gospel and its Recovery by Donald G. Bloesch

24.3—May/June 2011

God's English

The Making & Endurance of the King James Bible, 1611-2011 by Barton Swaim

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