23/09/2025
When he first appears Aslan is a clear-cut character within a story. In The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, he adopts a central role and plays out a part, albeit a fundamentally important one. He is Lewis’s attempt to ‘re-invent God’ for readers who have grown up in a culture from which God has either been removed or degraded. Aslan makes the four Pevensie children kings and queens, and banishes all traces of evil from his kingdom, before pulling the children back to Earth, their views invigorated.
By the time we reach the third book, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Aslan is more distant, appearing in other forms, such as a lamb and an albatross. He is even present but invisible, as the incident on the island of the Dufflepuds reveals. Lewis deepens our spiritual experience by making Aslan harder to find, and by changing his role. Faith - belief without seeing - becomes important. The character of the mouse Reepicheep, full of noble ideals, who is determined to find Aslan's Country, even if he has to swim to the end of the world to do so, is an embodiment of this. The Voyage of the Dawn Treader also introduces a non-believer, Eustace Clarence Scrubb. Eustace’s transformation from the dragon into which he is magically changed back into a boy, as Aslan peels away the layers of dragon skin, is a metaphor for conversion. This isn’t simply a Christian conversion, though, and the result is not merely ‘another Christian’: the whole point of the Chronicles is to ‘peel away’ the layers of a pervasive Ironic culture in order to show the reader a different way of looking at everything…
When he first appears Aslan is a clear-cut character within a story. In The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, he adopts a central role and plays out a part, albeit a fundamentally important one. He is Lewis’s attempt to ‘re-invent God’ for readers who have grown up in a culture from which God ...