Aslan
“But. But. In this figure [Aslan] it seems to me that Lewis has scored perhaps the most important point he ever scored. For he did the thing that is nearly impossible, namely, restored to the imagination of whole generations, entire categories that had vanished from the moral and metaphysical map. Ask yourself how you would even begin to suggest to a generation brought up on MTV, rock music, lewd cinema, pornography, and the omnipotent conspiracy of the whole of academia, political power, and the media to expunge what T. S. Eliot called ‘the permanent things’ from human imagination, and to replace them with relativism, egocentrism, cynicism, ostentatious squalor, and a sensuality that makes Gomorrah itself look like Mr. McGregor’s garden—ask yourself how you would flag down that generation with such notions as majesty, valor, purity, nobility, courtesy, magnanimity, magnificence, glory, and holiness.
We stagger at the very suggestion. I walk down a certain street in Boston where the skinheads gather in their black clothes and black lipstick (on both the females and the males—I can’t call them girls and boys, alas), with their safety pins through their eyebrows, cheeks, and lips, and I ask myself: How shall we speak of glory? Is there any common footing upon which an approach to sanctity might be mounted here?
In the figure of Aslan, we are regaled with all that has been expunged from our unhappy century. You need only to see the quivering nostrils and pricked-forward ears of the animals at the creation of Narnia, or sail with the Dawn Treader toward the utter East, or go with Digory to the garden where he will pick the apple, or with Susan and Lucy on the night of Aslan’s Passion, to see that it can be done.
It is a weight of glory that marks Aslan’s presence and Aslan’s country.”
~Thomas Howard
We stagger at the very suggestion. I walk down a certain street in Boston where the skinheads gather in their black clothes and black lipstick (on both the females and the males—I can’t call them girls and boys, alas), with their safety pins through their eyebrows, cheeks, and lips, and I ask myself: How shall we speak of glory? Is there any common footing upon which an approach to sanctity might be mounted here?
In the figure of Aslan, we are regaled with all that has been expunged from our unhappy century. You need only to see the quivering nostrils and pricked-forward ears of the animals at the creation of Narnia, or sail with the Dawn Treader toward the utter East, or go with Digory to the garden where he will pick the apple, or with Susan and Lucy on the night of Aslan’s Passion, to see that it can be done.
It is a weight of glory that marks Aslan’s presence and Aslan’s country.”
~Thomas Howard
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