In Reply to: "Chronicles of Narnia" posted by Oldtimer on December 11, 2005 at 16:09:16:
When the Chronicles of Narnia comes to the theatres, many Christans will be watching it eagerly to see if director Andrew Adamson (or 'son of Adam') has respected the story's Christian elements. Some of us, however, will be watching just as closely to see if the film has perserved those bits in C.S. Lewis's book that are a little more, shall we say, pagan. Presumably, the centaurs and fauns will look more or less like the mythological creatures depitcted in ancient Greco-Roman art. But will, say, Mr. Tumnus regale Lucy with stories of how the Roman god Bacchus filled the streams with wine when he feasted with the forest people?
In later books] Narnia is also liberated with the help from Bacchus and his drinking buddy Silenus [fauns], figures from Greco-Roman myth who were associated with drunken, mystical ceebrations in the forest called 'bacchanals.'
Scenes like these might have been shocking to the early Christians, who saw themselves in direct competition with paganism, and sometimes condemned the gods as demons in disguise. Lewis, however, stood this idea on its head, imagining in his 'Sapce Trilogy' that the gods were distant echoes of heavenly angels who oversaw the planets. To be sure, Lewis 'baptized' these pagan elements by situating them in a context where Aslan, the Christlike creator of Narnia, is firmly in control.
As Catholic critic Steven D. Greydanus had said, the Narnia stories are doubly apologetic. On the one hand, they introduce the non-Christian reader to stories with a Christian sensibility. But they also constitite an intruiging defence of pagan mythology -- a defence that may not be welcome in some modern churches. As the author of Mere Chistianity himself might say, the Narnian stories are Christian, but they are not merely that.