The links in the original posts in the thread are by now broken (404); it was simple enough for me to read them via the Internet Archive's "Wayback Machine", but if the articles are more permanently archived elsewhere I'd appreciate updated links.
I think that Bauder's condemnation of Lewis's "inclusivism" in The Last Battle is in error. The position that Bauder describes is indeed plainly heretical, but it's not at all the position that Lewis is advocating in the controversial scene of Emeth's meeting with Aslan. Lewis does not say that "whatever worship was offered sincerely to Tash was really offered to Aslan." If Lewis had believed that, many of the Calormenes would have been there, instead of only the one. Instead, I think Lewis is applying the Biblical principle that "by their fruits ye shall know them"---that there is a qualitative difference between the worship that the true God and the false god require, and Emeth, believing Tash to be the true, offered the worship that Aslan found acceptable, was accepted by Aslan. And I'm somewhat surprised that Bauder missed this, since in the first (introductory) post he mentioned Charles Williams, and Lewis describes a similar but more radical theme in Williams' poetry in the Arthurian Torso.
And Bauder is plainly wrong when he says that "Lewis intended Aslan to be a metaphor for Christ." It's been well-established (over and over) that Aslan is not a symbol, metaphor, "type", or (least of all) an allegorical representation of Christ; Aslan is the Second Person of the Trinity, incarnate in the form of a lion.
Lastly (ignoring the rankling of my pet-peeve by his consistent misunderstanding of what a true allegory is and is not), I think Bauder doesn't give enough weight to what words are used in the secondary-world's usus loquendi. His main point---that using words such as "magic", "wizard", "witch", and so on to describe its (to use this forum's term of art) cobha ought not necessarily condemn the work---is spot-on, but I think he ought to have considered the objection more seriously and charitably instead of dismissing its most trivial form. One might rightly be concerned if a Christian fantasy author included a mysterious but unmistakably good group called "the Geomancers", for example; a bookish-but-naive reader would be likely to look the term up, and would encounter descriptions of an ancient form of divination, which he might decide to experiment with.
|
