Power to the People

[davem]

Well, it was a personal opinion. She may have been ignorant of the Rules, but its still a bit like me accepting a challenge to a fight which my opponent intends to be limited to fists & on equal terms – winner takes all - when I have a gun in my belt which I haven't mentioned & which I fully intend to pull & use. My opponent might not have known I had the gun, so technically I may be in the right (& certainly it would be his fault for issuing such a hasty challenge) but I think most people would think I was cheating if I shot him as he stood there in his boxing gloves on the other side of the ring.

On the other hand, I accept that Aslan only agreed to be killed, & the question of whether resurrection was allowed seems never to have been discussed.

Mind you, I always felt Superman was a cheat in the same way too.

And I wasn't really comparing Gandalf with Aslan, just the differences in their deaths.

[Fordim Hedgethistle]

Funny, I'd always had the impression that Aslan was not entirely sure that things were going to come off so well. His attitude as he heads toward the sacrafice is certainly not upbeat nor confident! In fact, it's always reminded me of Frodo's state as he approaches Mount Doom: rather broken and sick at heart at the immensity of what he must perform, clinging to some indefinable hope that things will be better for everyone else but having little hope for himself.

I suppose the question is how far do you go down the Aslan-as-Christ road? If you see him as Christ I admit it would be hard to see him as I do (that is, like Frodo) -- but I don't see Aslan as Christ at all -- at least not as the Biblical (Primary World) Christ but as Narnia's Christ-figure. His knowledge is not certain, I don't think, insofar as he is not God-Made-Flesh. As we're told by the Beavers, he's a lion!

[JennyHallu]

See, I never got the impression from the Bible that Christ was altogether sure of his path. Always hopeful, and very confident. But when it came down to the hour of sacrifice he was mournful...he spent hours in private prayer in the Garden. Just think of his own words, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" The very fact that Christ's sacrifice was not easy is part of what gives it such power for Christians. If it was easy, then it would have been no sacrifice and shown no especial love for Men.

Pardon my brief journey into theology...

And the beavers also bade us understand that Aslan was not an ordinary lion. Just as Christ was a man, but not an ordinary man.

[The Squatter of Amon Rûdh]

I suppose the question is how far do you go down the Aslan-as-Christ road? If you see him as Christ I admit it would be hard to see him as I do (that is, like Frodo) -- but I don't see Aslan as Christ at all -- at least not as the Biblical (Primary World) Christ but as Narnia's Christ-figure.

But I didn't say, Fordim, that Aslan is Christ, rather that he is an allegory of Christ. I suppose that I should have called him an allegorical representation of Christ. Certainly one of Lewis's narrative aims seems to have been to explain the meaning of the Crucifixion in Christian thought by giving it a new context. Aslan is a lion, but the obvious association between the great lion and the Agnus Dei of the primary universe seems to point in this direction.

However, I seem to recall that as the Chronicles of Narnia progress, there are several references to Aslan having other names in other worlds, and to his having allowed the children to encounter him in Narnia so that they may come to know him in their own world. The conclusion of The Last Battle, where all worlds become one and the afterlife of 'our' world (or Lewis's version of it) merges with that of Narnia, would suggest that Lewis intended all along for Aslan and Christ to be different aspects of the same being within his fiction, but this seemed too complicated a point to make in support of my basic argument that the White Witch isn't cheated by anyone but herself.

Of course this brings me back to Davem and his dislike of the victory. The White Witch does, of course, think that she is being very clever indeed by trapping the Lion using cosmic laws that he is bound to uphold. I would say that rather than a 'fair' fight in which one party is armed and the other not, rather Aslan has agreed to stand there in boxing gloves while the Witch shoots at him. He has not told her whether her pistol is loaded or what will happen after she has taken her shot, and, deluded by her own cunning, she has not thought to ask. The parallels with medieval concepts of the Crucifixion and its place in Satan's final defeat seem obvious to me.

[littlemanpoet]

As is my wont, I would take it one step further than Squatter (whose posts here I have found to be very eloquent): Aslan is the Maker of a very complex piece of functional artistry. The White Witch tries to wrest it from him by means of aspects within the FA itself, but she doesn't understand it completely. He does. It's not about a fair fight.