Over at the Mirror of Justice, Rick Garnett has blogged the negative comments of Polly Toynbee in the Guardian about The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Not only does it seem to be the case, as Ms. Toynbee points out, that the English public can no longer understand artistic references to "agony in the garden", "deposition", "transfiguration" or "ascension," but in the person of Ms. Toynbee, who does not like the reference to Aslan as a lion, preferring only the lamb imagery, they also seem to have lost all sense of such literary biblical references as "the lion of Judah," a reference that Christians have for millennia taken to be a reference to Christ:

1And I saw in the right hand of him that sat on the throne a book written within and on the backside, sealed with seven seals.

2And I saw a strong angel proclaiming with a loud voice, Who is worthy to open the book, and to loose the seals thereof?

3And no man in heaven, nor in earth, neither under the earth, was able to open the book, neither to look thereon.

4And I wept much, because no man was found worthy to open and to read the book, neither to look thereon.

5And one of the elders saith unto me, Weep not: behold, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, hath prevailed to open the book, and to loose the seven seals thereof.

6And I beheld, and, lo, in the midst of the throne and of the four beasts, and in the midst of the elders, stood a Lamb as it had been slain, having seven horns and seven eyes, which are the seven Spirits of God sent forth into all the earth.

7And he came and took the book out of the right hand of him that sat upon the throne.

8And when he had taken the book, the four beasts and four and twenty elders fell down before the Lamb, having every one of them harps, and golden vials full of odours, which are the prayers of saints.

9And they sung a new song, saying, Thou art worthy to take the book, and to open the seals thereof: for thou wast slain, and hast redeemed us to God by thy blood out of every kindred, and tongue, and people, and nation;

10And hast made us unto our God kings and priests: and we shall reign on the earth.

11And I beheld, and I heard the voice of many angels round about the throne and the beasts and the elders: and the number of them was ten thousand times ten thousand, and thousands of thousands;

12Saying with a loud voice, Worthy is the Lamb that was slain to receive power, and riches, and wisdom, and strength, and honour, and glory, and blessing.

13And every creature which is in heaven, and on the earth, and under the earth, and such as are in the sea, and all that are in them, heard I saying, Blessing, and honour, and glory, and power, be unto him that sitteth upon the throne, and unto the Lamb for ever and ever.

14And the four beasts said, Amen. And the four and twenty elders fell down and worshipped him that liveth for ever and ever.

Revelation 5

That a writer writing in the land in which Handel's Messiah was written could not pick up on Lewis' allegorical reference to this allegorical passage in the book of Revelation is astounding. ("Blessing, and honour, and glory, and power, be unto him that sitteth upon the throne, and unto the Lamb for ever and ever.")

Ms. Toynbee appears completely tone deaf to the paradox-religion of Christianity, captured in Chesterton's poem about the Incarnation entitled Gloria in Profundis. One stanza of Chesterton's poem that captures what Ms. Toynbee fails to see is:

Who is proud when the heavens are humble,
Who mounts if the mountains fall,
If the fixed stars topple and tumble
And a deluge of love drowns all-
Who rears up his head for a crown,
Who holds up his will for a warrant,
Who strives with the starry torrent,
When all that is good goes down?

And he finishes it with this stanza:

Glory to God in the Lowest
The spout of the stars in spate-
Where thunderbolt thinks to be slowest
And the lightning fears to be late:
As men dive for sunken gem
Pursuing, we hunt and hound it,
The fallen star has found it
In the cavern of Bethlehem.


"Glory to God in the Lowest!"

Christ is both the lion and the lamb. We usually think of the lion sitting down with the lamb, and take that to be an image of pacifism, where we are to see it as a biblical moral about warring human parties sitting down together in peace, and it surely is that. But it is also a reference to the meeting of the Lion and the Lamb already achieved in the Incarnation of Christ uniting the two natures--God become man, so that man might become God. Notice the identification of the Lion with the Lamb in the passage from Revelation--it is only the Lion who is worthy to open the Book of Life Who is the Lamb sacrificed. A lamb sacrificed is merely pathetic. (See Nietzsche's metaphor of the Bird of Prey and the little lamb. "Nothing is tastier than a tender lamb."(Passage #13)) But a lion become a lamb sacrificed is redemptive. The war between heaven and earth has already been ended by what Chesterton describes as the event in which:

There has fallen on earth for a token
A god too great for the sky.
He has burst out of all things and broken
The bounds of eternity:
Into time and the terminal land.

The Lamb has already sat down with the Lion in the womb of Our Lady, and it is the Lion who will die as the Lamb of God on the Cross, arms extended to welcome all of creation in peace into that heavenly banquet, a banquet in which all will be kings, as Revelation has it. (Again, that a writer writing in the Guardian in a land that still has only one king or queen objects to a picture in which all will be kings is striking. But then I'm Irish.) It is this banquet that Lewis also refers to in the Voyage of the Dawn Treader, the voyage in search of the seven lost lords (seven lost lords who must be found, seven seals that must be broken.) It is of course as a foreshadowing of that table in the Voyage that Lewis has the Lion die as a Lamb on a table in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Indeed, we learn that the stone table of the last island in the Voyage of the Dawn Treader, with the stone knife set in its center, just is the same stone table and knife used to sacrifice the Lion-Lamb in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. The Lion becomes the Lamb so that the altar of sacrifice may become the table of communion.

Most striking is Toynbee's inability to recognize that as an allegory, the triumphant battle at the end over the White Witch and her minions is not a triumph over real persons, but a triumph over our own sinfulness, brought about by the sacrifice of the Lion-Lamb. Tolkien may not have liked the Chronicles because they were allegorical, as he thought allegory an inferior form of literature, but at least he had the good sense to actually read them as allegory in order not to like them. That another British writer cannot grasp the literary and artistic references to biblical themes in these stories, of one allegory to another, makes me proud to be an Irishman.

Especially an Irishman.