Another day, another beloved Christian IP bastardized by Hollywood?
That sure seems to be the reaction in some quarters after news dropped that the coming film reboot of The Chronicles of Narnia would feature the versatile Meryl Streep as the voice of Aslan.
Some of it was in line with the reaction to Christopher Nolan’s casting choices in his megahit epic The Odyssey. How, in an age of strictly policed ethnic and sexual correctness in the entertainment biz, can you get away with a decidedly un-Greek Helen or a female-voiced Aslan? That you could say in either case that “it’s just a story” seems to address neither the double standard nor the violence done to the source material.
There doesn’t seem to be any indication that Aslan will be visually depicted as a lioness, or that he will have a mane but insist on ”she/her.” And no word that Streep’s voice will be digitally lowered to a male register. Aslan will still be the King of the Jungle, only with the vocal timbre of a seventy-seven-year-old lady who wears Prada. Some Twitter wags were quick to call him “Translan” and write off the whole thing as cheap culture-war propaganda.
Elite culture’s double standards and impish needling of conservative pieties will always be with us, and to me, the squirt from getting worked up about it usually isn’t worth the squeeze. And so ordinarily I would add this outrage to the pile and move on.
But I think there’s a deeper problem worth noting here—because Narnia is not just a story, and Aslan is not just a character.
When Cambridge don and popular Christian apologist C.S. Lewis began writing the Narnia books, beginning in 1950 with The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, he found immediate commercial success but also criticism, notably from his friend and collaborator J.R.R. Tolkien. The Lord of the Rings author, known for his own meticulous world-building, was dissatisfied with what he considered haphazard details in the Narnia mythos.
Tolkien was also famously touchy about allegory—fiction that points to something else, a kind of transparent parallel meaning—and constantly repudiated attempts by fans and critics to make his characters and stories mere stand-ins for some religious or historical or political concern.
It must have seemed to Tolkien that Aslan, a powerful being who arrives in the world from afar and gives his life to ransom a traitor, only to be resurrected and to raise others from the dead before leading his people in a great battle, was allegorical straight to the nose, an obvious stand-in for Jesus, and that the whole story was a fairytale retelling of the gospel. And maybe that’s how Lewis meant it, at first.
But, as the Narnia canon grew to seven novels, Lewis buttoned down the mythos. He would never aspire to Tolkien’s levels of detail, but gradually he filled in the gaps of his fairytale universe and gave the whole thing a satisfying and mostly coherent epic arc. And [SPOILER FOLLOWS] most importantly of all, he let it be known that Aslan was not a symbol of Jesus, but the Lord himself, by another name and in a different incarnation.
And this is why feminizing Aslan on the big screen is so problematic. In his divine nature, God has neither a body nor a sex, but, according to the Second Person of the Trinity, God became and remains man.
The knife-edge balance of this central mystery of the Faith took centuries of early Church debate to get just right. It would have been easier to have settled on any number of sensible-sounding heresies: the divine Jesus only appeared to have a human body; or he was some kind of divine-human hybrid like a Greek hero of old; or he was the greatest creation ever, but no God. But the Fathers, still glowing with the apostolic energy and knowledge just a few generations old, made sure to preserve the revealed truth in its fullness: a divine person took to himself a full human nature; God and humanity uniting without confusion or change, without separation or division.
It’s no less important to get all this right today than it was in the fourth century, because the very identity of Christianity rests on its historicity and specificity. Jesus wasn’t born once upon a time; he was born in Bethlehem of Judea, in the days of King Herod. He wasn’t killed by vague bad guys in the mists of prehistory; he was crucified under Pontius Pilate, fifth governor of Judea, during the reign of Emperor Tiberius. And the Word was not made flesh in the abstract, a mere avatar of general humynity; he became man and a man, human of the male sex.
Christianity’s enemies and would-be reinventors, some of whom make movies, hate all this specificity. They prefer Jesus the infinitely malleable concept just like they prefer man and woman of infinitely fluid “gender.” A female-voiced Aslan/Jesus subtly pushes both: nudging viewers toward a gnostic Christology untethered from history and the flesh, and toward a gnostic anthropology in which sex, gender, and the body (including the body’s voice) are not aligned by necessity but can be recombined at will.
In The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, the witch Jadis postures as both a queen and a creatress when in fact she is a fraud and usurper—a mortal using deceit and coercion to claim divine prerogatives. This was the sin of our first parents, and its echo reverberates still.
Image credit: Original image by Dick Thomas Johnson, via Flickr, licensed under CC BY 2.0. Modified/remixed by Emily Dinneny.
Todd Aglialoro is director of publishing for Catholic Answers Press.
Yeah, and while transing Aslan is the worst, I've also read that the White Witch ie Satan is a "beloved character." No, she's not - she's Satan. It's as if Gerwig deliberately set out to turn everything upside down.