This four-part series explores how we can fulfill our calling as Christians by cultivating “Narnian” hearts that sow the kingdom on earth, growing “little Edens.” Part one discusses the sickness of sin in our world and this calling. Part two discusses the cultivation of love over selfishness. Look for one more post after this one.

By Karissa Riffel

By the turn of the century, the Western world had become a machine: capable of great efficiency—and yet plagued with poverty. This is the world in which The Magician’s Nephew is set. Today, as if no more than machines ourselves, we are caught in a cycle of producing and consuming, valuing the world only for the things it gives us. 

Domination vs. Dominion

When Digory and Polly accidentally transport the Witch to our world, she treats it as she treated Charn: a place to serve her desires and whims. In Narnia, Uncle Andrew acts much the same when he sees the broken lamppost grow into a new one: he immediately begins making plans for exploiting this power. His greed and misconception of the world drive him to excess. 

By contrast, the cabby—who got whisked away to Narnia along with his horse—reacts with wonder: “I’d ha’ been a better man all my life if I’d known there were things like this.”[1] Even his tough, urban manner softens. He and his wife promise to “rule and name these creatures, and do justice among them, and protect them from their enemies when enemies arise.”[2] 

This is much like the command given to Adam and Eve: “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over” all living things (Genesis 1:28). Here we see the difference between dominating creation—like the Witch and Uncle Andrew—and having dominion over it, like the cabby and his wife. One seeks personal gain at all costs, even the destruction of the creation. The other seeks to cultivate and improve creation. Mankind is called to steward the world the way the cabby and his wife rule and protect Narnia, participating in the true restoration to come. But how do we do this? 

The Cosmos in Song

When Aslan creates the world, he does it through song. Then suddenly an expanse of stars illuminate the sky all at once, joining the song with silvery voices in perfect harmony.” Lewis was likely thinking of another model of the heavens found in Medieval cosmology: the idea that the stars and planets produce their own music, each heavenly body with its own tone, creating a symphony and an order.[3]

Today, we rarely see the heavens, or anything in the natural world for that matter, with such imagination and poetry. In The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, the children meet a fallen star, and Eustace cannot believe it. He says, “In our world . . . a star is a huge ball of flaming gas,” but the star replies “Even your world, my son, that is not what a star is but only what it is made of.”[4] 

Of course this is not to suggest that stars are not in fact made of gas, but that perhaps a scientific understanding of the created world is not the only understanding. When we conceive of the natural world in other ways—when we see it as beautiful, real, and good—that view becomes the antidote for the self-centered, consumerist mindset of the Witch, the mindset we so often have in our world today.

Strawberry to Fledge

Aslan transforms the cabby’s horse, Strawberry, into a winged horse, renaming him Fledge. The cultivation of Narnia has made him a truer, better version of himself; Strawberry has become what he was meant to be. 

In The Abolition of Man, Lewis talks about two kinds of people: 

The man who really knows horses and really loves them, not with anthropomorphic illusions, but with ordinate love, and the irredeemable urban blockhead to whom a horse is merely an old-fashioned means of transport.[5] 

When we love something and understand it, we can see things as they truly are.

But of course, as the cabby would not have changed, nor would Strawberry have been transformed, without Aslan, so we cannot achieve this love without Christ. Despite her stature and her grandeur, when the Witch sees Aslan and hears his song, she runs away in fear. In the face of true goodness and beauty, evil flees. 

NEXT TIME, Part 4: “Healing Is Coming”

Karissa Riffel is an English teacher, mother, and cohost of the Lit Ladies podcast. Her short fiction has appeared in various magazines and anthologies. Her nonfiction has appeared on The Rabbit Room blog and is forthcoming by the CiRCE Institute. She writes about art, literature, and faith on her Substack Midnight Ink.

[1] C. S. Lewis, The Magician’s Nephew (Harper Trophy, 1994), 107.

[2] Lewis, Nephew, 151.

[3] Jason M. Baxter, The Medieval Mind of C.S. Lewis: How Great Books Shaped a Great Mind (InterVarsity Press, 2022). 

[4] C. S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (Harper Trophy, 1994), 209.

[5] C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (HarperOne, 2015), 11.