Lewis: he wrote a whole scholarly work, The Allegory of Love, about medieval and Renaissance allegory. Perhaps this is a distinction without a difference to many readers, but it’s worth bearing in mind that if anyone should know what allegory is, it’s C. We might think of this as something like the distinction between simile and metaphor: simile is like allegory, because one thing is like something else, whereas in metaphor, one thing is the other thing.Īslan is not like Jesus (allegory): he is Jesus’ equivalent in Narnia. But he doesn’t: he is Jesus, if Narnia existed and a deity decided to walk among the people of that world. In short, Lewis rejects the idea that his Narnia books are allegory because, for them to qualify as allegorical, Aslan would have to ‘represent’ Jesus. Lewis didn’t regard them as allegory: ‘In reality,’ he wrote, Aslan ‘is an invention giving an imaginary answer to the question, “What might Christ become like if there really were a world like Narnia, and He chose to be incarnate and die and rise again in that world as He actually has done in ours?” This is not allegory at all.’ Lewis book(s) that are Christian allegory, right?’ But C. Say ‘ Chronicles of Narnia’ or ‘ The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe’ and many people will say, ‘Oh, the C.
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