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De-fanging C.S. Lewis: Will new Narnia books lose the religion?

https://www.catholiceducation.org/en/culture/art/de-fanging-c-s-lewis-will-new-narnia-books-lose-the-religion.html

By Joe Woodward, National Catholic Register, July 2001

More than half a century after the original series was published, HarperCollins Publishers has announced its plans to create a new series of Narnia children’s novels and picture books, using a stable of established children’s fantasy writers. The publisher seems eager to give the kids what they want, but not necessarily their parents.

Children like the Narnia Chronicles because they evoke a fantasy wonderland populated by people like Digory, Polly, Lucy, Edmund and the great lion, Aslan. Catholic parents like them because they know Aslan is a Christ figure and the author, C.S. Lewis, wrote the books in part to evangelize readers.

C.S. Lewis Co. director Simon Adley, holding the Narnia copyright, assured Lewis fans this spring that his estate would play a role in the new series, to avoid "exploitation of the books."

Weeks later, however, a HarperCollins strategy memo was leaked to the media that was less reassuring.

"Obviously, this is a biggie as far as the estate and our publishing interests are concerned," wrote an involved Harper San Francisco executive. "We'll need to be able to give emphatic assurances that no attempt will be made to correlate the stories to Christian imagery/theology."

With the leaking of that memo, the fat was in the fire. Catholic, Protestant and agnostic commentators alike denounced the memo.

"The Narnia books are classics just because of their overarching Christian moral structure," chided Ottawa Citizen editorialist John Robson. Seattle University professor John G. West, co-editor of the C.S. Lewis Readers' Encyclopedia, fumed that "they're turning Narnia into a British version of Mickey Mouse."

Another commentator quipped, "The series will be just another amputee pretending it still walks on both feet." And newspaper letter-writers were generally "repulsed by the greed and blatant ignorance of HarperCollins and C.S. Lewis's estate."

Not everyone has been so alarmed by the publisher's plans, however.

"It's just the Harry Potter thing, and after all, they're just trying to make money," said Toronto writer Michael Coren, author of the biography, C.S. Lewis: The Man Who Created Narnia. "They'll have a hell of a job de-Christianizing Lewis, because his Christianity is so implicit and so frequent. So what if they do? Anybody who likes the spin-offs will read Lewis himself. Anybody who likes the abridged version will go back to the original."

He cited the movie Shadowlands, starring Anthony Hopkins, which he said was another "de-Christianized version of Lewis."

"But so what?" he asked. "It didn't hurt anything, and it got more people reading him."
The author's view

When Lewis first began publishing his Narnia books in 1950, he apparently made no attempt to advertise their Christian motifs. Yet, in a 1954 letter, he wrote that the Narnia Chronicles began with the premise of the Son of God becoming incarnate as a lion in a different reality a world with a "doorway" to 20th century Britain through a wardrobe in the attic of a London home.

Narnia's Christianity may be only implicit, but it is pervasive. In Volume 1, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the Christ-lion Aslan gives up his own life to save a child who's turned traitor - Aslan then returns to life.

In another volume, a boy turns himself into a dragon by dwelling on his resentments. When he then wishes to regain his friendship with the other children, Aslan leads him to a pool of water baptism where he painfully rips off his scales and frees the boy within.

And in the final volume, The Last Battle, the children take part in an Apocalypse the End-time for the world of Narnia mirroring the Bible's Book of Revelation.

Until the Harry Potter revolution in juvenile literature, the seven volumes of Lewis' Narnia series were the most influential children's books in the world, voted so by successive polls of parents, librarians and teachers, and by their sales: 65 million copies in 30 languages over 50 years.

In the last four years, however, British writer J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter books have sold 100 million in 42 languages.

The Potter books haven't cut into Narnia's market. They've greatly expanded it. HarperCollins' decision to extend the Narnia series was reportedly sparked by the fact that, once Pottermania really took off, Narnia sales rose 20%.

In a formal June 4 statement on its C.S. Lewis Publishing Program, the publisher says its goal is "to publish the works of C.S. Lewis to the broadest possible audience, and leave any interpretation of the works to the reader."

In a brief interview with the Register, June 12, HarperCollins executive Lisa Herling would first refer only to the June 4 statement: "The works of C.S. Lewis will continue to be published by HarperCollins as written by the author with no alteration."

Then when pressed to confirm whether there would be new Narnia books, written by new authors, she did say, "It is expected that there will be future books."
Creating new classics?

Focus on the Family writer Paul McCusker, producing the Narnia books as radio plays, said, "I've been fascinated by the reaction to the news of the new Narnia books. I've gotten dozens e-mails from people wondering what's happening."

McCusker sees no problem in a publisher downplaying the Christianity in Lewis' own books, since Lewis himself "never made a big deal of it. He was amused that kids picked up the biblical imagery quicker than adults."

And if downplaying it improves the marketability and broadens the books' exposure, so much the better, he said.

But writing new stories, shorn of his Christianity, is another matter. "Lewis's Christianity was integral to his worldview," he said. "How true could the new books be to Narnia, if they take that out? Could you trust any writer who'd do it?"

What can't be anticipated is the effect on the HarperCollins writers themselves, from immersion in the original, McCusker said. "You can pray there'll be something redemptive in the process of writing them."

Christopher Mitchell is director of the Marion E. Wade Center in Wheaton (Ill.) College, home of the Lewis archives. He said the new books will likely be, not sequels to the old plot line, but rather stories stuck in the gaps of the existing tales.

"Clearly, they're facing a great challenge," he said. "The minimum they'll have to achieve, to stay true to Lewis's intention, is to make good attractive, while not making the bad any less bad. It's always easy to create believable evil characters. Making goodness believable and attractive is hard. And the new books will be judged from the perspective of the classics."

Boston College philosophy professor Peter Kreeft said that the providential order, "the benign concern of a hidden God," distinguishes Christian fantasy from the pagan alternatives, like Harry Potter. The fantasy universe differs in detail, but not in principle.

"Good and evil, justice and injustice, loyalty and betrayal, life and death, these remain the same, no matter how different the fantasy world," Kreeft said.

Christian fantasy serves at least three purposes, Kreeft said: Human beings inevitably see the world through moral categories. The moral imagination, the lens of these perceptions, is inevitably shaped by stories, tales and myths. "False myths," where falsehood triumphs and evil brings happiness, are intellectual pornography, actively corrupting the young, said Kreeft.

The Harry Potter books are largely innocuous, Kreeft thought. If they have a problem, it lies not in the fact that their magic is demonic, but rather that it is so pedestrian and technological concerned with things like baking cakes, traveling and playing pranks.

"Real" magic, the magic of Narnia and J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, is "a beauty that can't be controlled," something that "we enter into," rather than simply use.
Dad's view

Catholic father-of-eight Paul Moroney said that he was first exposed to the Narnia books as a boy, read them again in college, and has read them aloud to his kids when the books could be dug out of the bedrooms of the older kids.

"If the new books don't have a Christian message," Moroney said, "I couldn't see us going past the first one."

Is Harry Potter good for our kids?

http://www.ewtn.com/library/ISSUES/harry_potter.pdf

By Vivian W. Dudro, St. Joseph’s Covenant Keepers, July-August 2000

With all of the media hype, even in the Catholic press, I could not help looking over the Harry Potter books while shopping one day. After reading a few pages, I put Potter down with a shudder. Oozing with the occult and dressed with disgusting details, these stories by J.K. Rowling are not the kind of thing I would read my little ones at bedtime. Compared with the truly great books lining our shelves at home, they are not the kind of literature I would want my 10- and 12-year-old sons to read on their own, either.

Despite my decision to pass on Potter, he has affected my children. As we were leaving the park one recent afternoon, my six-year-old daughter informed me that she and a herd of other girls her age had pretended they were the characters from the Rowling books.

“We were using sticks as magic wands, Mom,” she said. “Oh? And what were you doing with these magic wands?” I asked.

“We were casting spells and killing bugs,” she answered. “Why were you killing bugs?” “Because they were the bad guys,” she shrugged.

Her responses troubled me. How has Harry Potter become so ubiquitous that he influences the play of children too young to read about him? More importantly, why do these stories link magic, power and the killing of one's enemies in the tender imagination of little girls? To begin answering these questions, I read two of the books myself.

In the very beginning of the first two episodes, Rowling's heavy-handed and sophomoric treatment of Harry’s aunt, uncle and cousin disturbed me. These relatives, who become Harry's adoptive family after the murder of his parents, are narcissistic and vulgar, with no redeeming characteristics whatsoever.

In one repulsive scene, Cousin Dudley belches at the breakfast table, while his fat buttocks hang over the sides of the chair. Meanwhile, with a bit of food clinging to his face, Uncle Vernon sputters forth with his customary rage. Call it a matter of taste, but these antics evoke no laughter from me. Rowling's sneers at a grasping middle-class family cannot hold a candle to the satire of Mark Twain, Charles Dickens or Jane Austen.

The most terrible feature of Harry's relations is not their churlishness, but their heartlessness toward the orphaned boy. While they spoil their own horrible son with two bedrooms, Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia assign Harry a spider-infested closet. In the second book, they lock him in a room with bars on the windows, and feed him a starvation diet through a slot in the door. The reason for their harshness, apart from their own selfishness, is Harry's magical background.

This is an abnormality, they declare, that they will not tolerate.

Tolerance, of course, is a Christian virtue based upon respect for man's God-given freedom. While Catholic children should be trained to respect those who do not profess their faith, they also should be taught that the practice of magic is a serious sin.

Apart from prayer to God, the invocation of superhuman powers in order to obtain results beyond the capacity of mere nature is condemned with the strongest language in both the Old and New Testaments. The Catechism of the Catholic Church declares the practice of magic “gravely contrary to the virtue of religion,” for it involves a mistrust of God and a refusal to accept His will.

The practice of magic can lead to the worship of nature, man, or Satan.

Because he is a wizard by birth, Harry is sent for by Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry and is delivered from the hands of his relatives.

At this boarding school, the alma mater of Harry's dead parents, the twelve-year old grows into his true identity. In Albus Dumbledore, the seemingly sagacious wizard who directs Hogwarts, Harry finds a mentor/father figure. Peripheral to the main unfolding of the plot, Dumbledore conveniently appears after the climax of the first two books to neatly interpret

Harry's harrowing, coming-of-age experiences at school.

There is some humor to be found at Hogwarts, which is housed in a mysterious, haunted castle. Among Harry's textbooks, for example, is “One Thousand Magical Herbs and Fungi” by Phyllida Spore.

The lethal beast guarding a secret in the bowels of the castle is named Fluffy. But the overall atmosphere at Hogwarts is ominous, and many of the features of daily life there are gruesome. From a good guy eating an earwaxflavored jelly bean to a bad guy drinking unicorn blood, there is a distinct dash of the macabre.

The subjects taught at Hogwarts range from ordinary fields of knowledge, such as astronomy and botany, to magical arts such as changing one object into another, casting spells and mixing potions. Nearly every forbidden magical practice known to man is mentioned or explored. In contrast to the dull and narrow world of Harry's non-magic relatives, Hogwarts appears interesting and broadening. Looking at a drawing of the castle on the back of the second book, my 12-yearold son declared, “That looks so cool!”

On the surface, the Harry Potter tales fit right in with Goosebumps, Rugrats, and that gooey cerebrallike matter designed for throwing upon walls. Yes, pre-pubescent boys, especially, can think this stuff is pretty neat, hence there is a huge market for it. But if we want our children to love truth, goodness and beauty, then why are we buying them products that encourage their tendencies toward the grotesque?

Of course, all great literature illustrates the dark side of human existence; however, the best authors do not intend darkness itself as entertainment.

Like shadows in a landscape that make the bright spots all the more brighter, evil in fiction should serve as a contrast to the good. Perversely, Rowling presents her dismal world of the occult as a circus. Worse than that, she offers it as a desirable alternative to her caricature of normalcy.

Rowling has been quoted as saying she does not believe in magic, but in God. To her credit, she places the hocus-pocus at Hogwarts in a moral framework, in which some uses of magic are good and others bad.

The Sorcerer's Stone, which brings everlasting life and riches to whoever possesses it, is destroyed at the end of the first episode because, like the ring in J.R.R. Tolkien's books, the stone had become a source of corruption.

When one peels away the magic, it appears Rowling is addressing important moral questions. Often Harry must make difficult choices, and like any other school boy, he is sent to detention when he is caught breaking the rules. When Harry is in mortal danger, as he is at the end of the first two books, it is self-sacrificial love, not magic per se, that saves him. Harry's ultimate quest, it seems, is not so much to develop his powers as a wizard as it is to develop his character.

While I am gratified to find such themes in Rowling's books, I nevertheless consider her smorgasbord of magic, yuck, and gore an unfitting package for the truth. Moreover, her stories create the impression that some of us, like Potter and Dumbledore, could learn to handle occult powers and wield them for good.

This is a grave error, for our intentions, however noble, cannot transform an objective evil into a good.

Though the books are fantasy, young readers relate to Harry and his classmates as their own peers.

The aspiring witches and wizards at Hogwarts are not otherworldly beings from some prehistoric age, such as the wizards

Gandalf in the Lord of the Rings and Merlin in the Arthurian legends. Rather, they are ordinary boys and girls, with the exception that they have inexplicably inherited a magical gene present in the human race. By following their education, could our children's curiosity in the occult or in the bizarre be sparked? Could their spiritual defenses against certain temptations be weakened?

Could their imaginations become haunts of “things that go bump in the night”?

According to a public librarian here in San Francisco, the Potter stories already have inspired countless children to seek other books about witches, wizards, and spooks. The city's libraries have stocked their juvenile collections with this subject matter, along with Rowling's titles in order to encourage summer reading. The trend concerns me because, apart from serious sin, occultism is the main way the diabolical can enter a person's life.

Nevertheless, many, many other parents, including Catholic ones, remain untroubled. They consider the Harry Potter stories perfectly acceptable for their children. As a result, Harry Potter has become a pop culture icon.

After the new sequel is released this summer, there will still be three more forthcoming episodes in the continuing

Potter saga. Also lying ahead are Harry Potter movies, and spin-off Mattel action figures.

Given the enormous profitability of the young wizard, one can only guess what other magical heroes and heroines will be created next. And when all of the money made off our hunger for the supernatural has been counted, what level of literary accomplishment and what vision of spiritual reality will have been sold to our children?

That remains to be seen.


Vivian W. Dudro is a free-lance writer and editor, and the mother of four children ages 4 to 12.

Her articles have appeared in Catholic publications nationwide. Currently she writes a regular column on family life for the Catholic San Francisco.

The trouble with Harry

http://www.ewtn.com/library/ISSUES/harry_potter.pdf

By John Andrew Murray, St. Joseph’s Covenant Keepers, July-August 2000

Some Christians think Harry Potter is a hero. Others think the young wizard’s best-selling adventures are simply evil.

What’s a concerned parent to think?

Having sold more than 30 million copies, the four Harry Potter books released so far have created a stir in public schools across America.

Some Christian parents have complained that J.K. Rowling’s tales of young witches and wizards are terrifying to young children and inappropriate for classroom use.

They’ve been rewarded for their concern with ridicule in newspapers and editorial cartoons.

Complicating the matter is the fact that several Christian leaders and conservative magazines have praised the series’ ability to captivate even the most reluctant young readers.

And the controversy has just begun.

Warner Bros. purchased movie rights to the books two years ago, along with the potential for building a billion-dollar franchise. Steven Spielberg has been mentioned as director of the film, and Warner will reportedly spend $45 million for special effects alone. What’s more, The Wall Street Journal says the company is counting on big profits from sequels, TV broadcast rights, cartoon spin-offs, home-video sales, theme park rides and interactive games.

Rowling, a single mother in Britain, has said she will write a total of seven books, the last to be released in 2003. She’s already written the final chapter of the last book. (She’s also made it clear that the books will grow along with the adolescent Harry–he’ll discover the opposite sex, for example– and darker themes, including the death of a friend, are not off-limits.)

If you think it’s bad now, in a year or two, there may be no avoiding the Harry Potter craze. That’s why it’s important now to understand just what sort of worldview the books present.
Lower than a dog

I can admit now that when I graduated from Vanderbilt University in 1990 with a degree in English and history, I had little awareness of the media’s effects on children. I would have jumped at the chance to read Harry Potter to my sixth-grade English class. Instead, I used an old television series, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, each Monday to teach my students about plot development within a story.

One week I stopped the video before the show’s end and asked the students to write their own endings. They were so excited, they wanted to read their work aloud in class. I allowed them to do so, but the slasher-film endings I heard horrified and sickened me. After about the third student, I decided to read the rest silently. There were only a few that

I thought were appropriate to share with the class.

When I later expressed my concern to the students, they defended their compositions, insisting that media violence had no effect. After all, they said, they understood that the killings they saw on TV and movies were “fake.” But when I asked them how they would feel if they saw a TV program in which a dog was machine-gunned, they expressed their disgust in unison.

That presented me with a chance to make a simple point: The reason they found the shooting death of a dog so horrible is because they hadn’t been desensitized to it, as they were to the murder of a human. So how does this relate to teaching Harry Potter?

With the growing popularity of youth-oriented TV shows on witchcraft–Sabrina, the Teenage Witch; Charmed; Buffy the Vampire Slayer–a generation of children is becoming desensitized to the occult. But with Hollywood’s help, Harry Potter will likely surpass all these influences, potentially reaping some grave spiritual consequences.
Who is Harry Potter?

As noted above, Harry has inspired a variety of differing reactions, even among evangelicals. One Christian father of two daughters, ages 10 and 12, says that his youngest girl is “in love” with the Potter books. “They are her all-time favorites,” he said. “She and her friends have read them multiple times.” The father said that his daughter had grown weary of

Nancy Drew mysteries–“these are all the same,” she told him–and that books from Christian publishers are too “formulaic” and “will not stand the test of time as literature.” He doesn’t want his children to turn to television for stimulation, so he’s actually pleased by the Harry Potter craze. “Even if that literature may not necessarily espouse Christian values, if it excites them in ways that compete successfully with TV, it is making a wonderful contribution to their developing worldview,” he says.

What makes Harry Potter’s world so attractive–even to Christians?

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, the first of Rowling’s three books, introduces Harry as an orphaned baby. Readers quickly learn that Harry has survived an attack by the series’ evil wizard: Lord Voldemort.

Although successfully destroying Harry’s parents (a wizard and witch), Voldemort mysteriously fails in his attempts to kill Harry, leaving a lightning-bolt scar on the infant Harry’s forehead. Furthermore, in the process, Voldemort loses most of his power, thus making Harry an instant legend in the world of witchcraft.

Rescued by the “good wizard forces,” Harry is deposited on the London suburb doorstep of his Muggle Aunt and Uncle. (Muggles are everyday people who are oblivious to the workings of the witches’ and wizards’ world.) Forced to sleep in a basement cupboard, Harry is tormented by his unloving relatives for the next 10 years–a Cinderella-like persecution that readily earns the reader’s sympathy.

Upon his 11th birthday, which occurs early in the book, Harry’s life takes a dramatic turn. He learns the true origin of both the lightning-bolt scar and his parents’ cause of death, and is rescued from his Muggle relatives. He’s enrolled in Hogwarts–the premier boarding school for “Witchcraft and Wizardry.”

With Hogwarts as the main setting, Harry displays loyalty to his new friends and school, and bravery when battling the evil Lord Voldemort.

“The good is always more attractive than the bad,” said the father whose daughter cherishes the books. “Loyalty, honesty, charity are celebrated. Harry has friends he respects.”