Lewis did have a few issues with women. He had no sisters & his mother died young; then, of course, he was sent to a succession of boys-only schools. The possible affair with the live-in, much older mother of a dead friend is a bit outside the “normal” range, too. His story, The Shoddy Lands, demonstrates a certain dismay at what he considered “the female mind.”
I read the Narnia tales a bit late in life to appreciate them. I loved his Space Trilogy in high school but don’t know how it will hold up to re-reading. Still love Till We Have Faces, though.
I agree that that’s what Lewis was getting at . . . and that’s why the bit with Susan is absolutely the worst part of the series for me. Because the thing is, nobody rejects Christianity because they’ve seen obvious miracles and just aren’t willing to believe it. They reject it because they haven’t seen such proof. You better believe that if my Jewish grandpa rose from the dead and came knocking on my door saying “Hey Tim, guess what? Turns out I was wrong, it’s Jesus all the way” that I would convert to Christianity right then and there. But that isn’t happening. And honestly, it’s kind of insulting to non-believers to act like we’re just so arrogant that we’re willing to deny something that’s patently obvious.
I don’t mean to threadshit, this whole business with Susan and the message behind it just really makes me see red. Sorry. Rant over.
That’s about the line I took in the story what I wrote. A mysterious stranger visits “an old woman” in a rest home and, while carrying out a plumbing job in her room, gets her to tell the story of her life. It all ties in with her trip to America and how exciting she found it, and how she decided the nearest thing to being a Narnian Queen she would ever experience again was to network herself into becoming a Hollywood starlet. Hence pursuing the party circuit with all her might, though she never managed to actually get anywhere before her good looks burned out.
I beg to differ. I know people who have had what they themselves still regard as supernatural/paranormal/miraculous experiences in the Christian faith who have left the faith because they could/would not surrender other beliefs/behaviors which they saw in conflict with the faith. They themselves will admit they experienced healings & casting out spirits in Jesus’ Name, but they will not now accept Jesus as Lord & Savior.
Seriously? They’ll say “Jesus healed me, but I don’t really believe in Jesus?” How the heck do they reconcile that?
I guess I could see if someone had some sort of polytheistic faith where they thought “Sure, Jesus has supernatural powers, but I still think Zeus is more worthy of worship.” Otherwise, that doesn’t make sense to me . . . but it wouldn’t be the first time I’ve underestimated how illogical people can be.
Technically, they would be more likely to say they were healed after praying to Jesus, not that Jesus healed them. It gets very touchy when I probe further, so the closest I can figure is that they believe that they tapped into a force that could heal & banish harassing entities but that it would have worked no matter what they put their faith in at the time.
Then again, they may well believe that Jesus is one power among others.
At any rate, I concede that my rant should probably be softened to “most non-believers aren’t rejecting Christianity because they’ve seen obvious miracles and refuse to be convinced, but rather because they haven’t seen any miracles”. (It’s harder to build up a good froth when I put it that way, though.) For what it’s worth, I don’t personally believe in (literal) miracles, but I have to agree with FriarTed’s implication that it’s more relevant to ask whether the person herself views it as a miracle.
It’s actually more common than you might think for someone to have what they consider miracles in their life, events that they strongly attribute the workings of God, and then later revise those events in their head and reject that God had anything to do with it.
The human mind is a miraculous thing in and of itself. we are very much able to change our own stories and memories. It’s very easy to say “oh I was deluded/dreaming/fantasizing/crazy” and reject something you once believed.
It’s also very easy to push something that was once important to you into the background and vocal deny it’s importance while still not really convincing yourself. This is what I think happened to Susan. She wanted the boys and the nylons and the pretty things. She wanted to be cool and accepted and talking about Narnia isn’t a great way to get dates. I believe as she matured she came back to her belief and found it waiting for her.
This is of course why I like it when a story just finishes and doesn’t drag on forever trying to tie up every loose end. I want the author to leave me a little of the story to finish myself.
Yep, I know people who have done it. In the Bible, Jesus says that signs aren’t given out to people who want them as proof. Because miracles don’t convert people. You can always talk yourself out of it if you want to.
I do like to think that Susan grew up and went back. I think that would be completely realistic.
Incidentally I think that if you want to say “Why did it have to be a girl who backslid? Why couldn’t it be a boy? That’s sexist!” you have to answer “Why did it have to be a boy whose fault it was Aslan had to die?” or “Why did it have to be a boy who was a giant jerk and had to turn into a dragon to learn his lesson”. :dubious:
I always assumed Susan simply grew up and discarded childish fantasies. But the younger children were frozen at an early age when they died and were still capable of entering Narnia again.
Sort of “If you believe it, it can come true.” The same philosophy used to keep Tinker Bell alive in Peter Pan.
dangermom wrote: “Because miracles don’t convert people. You can always talk yourself out of it if you want to.” (bolding mine)
See, if I was being too extreme in saying (paraphrasing) “Nobody rejects Christianity in spite of witnessing a miracle”, then this is equally too extreme the other way. Because surely miracles do convert some people . . . in fact, I would dare say most people would be converted by witnessing a sufficiently dramatic miracle. At the very least, we have plenty of historical records of people who converted after witnessing what they believed to be a miracle.
So if (1) Christian beliefs are factually correct and (2) God wants to convert as many people to Christianity as possible, then we’d sure as heck expect to be seeing a lot more miracles. The fact that we aren’t seeing them indicates that at least one of those two premises is false (which I’m sure surprises no one, but I imagine there’d be plenty of debate about which one it is).
I’ve seen folks say on this very board that if they witnessed an honest-to-God, genuine, undeniable miracle, they would conclude that they were going crazy and hallucinating rather than accept it as evidence of the supernatural. Such folks may be rare, but they do exist.
As for the question of continuing Susan’s story, I think it’s an essential element of the books as a whole that that story not be completed. Maybe she found faith again, and maybe she didn’t: We can hope, but we don’t know. To resolve that ambiguity would diminish the stories as a whole, not enhance them.
I think if I witnessed a supposed miracle I would be inclined to think it’s more likely that I was hallucinating or crazy (especially if it is brief, not witnessed by others, etc…). Occam’s Razor and all that.
Susan’s “miracle”, however, was living most of a lifetime in another world, with her brothers and sisters as witnesses who could all corroborate the events. Much harder to brush off as just a hallucination or something.
Well, except that Peter was older than Susan, and Polly and Digory were far older, and Susan’s problem was too little growing up, not too much. She rushed on ahead to get to the silly party-girl stage as soon as she could, and didn’t want to give that up in favour of, say, marriage and motherhood and so on.
Okay, but we also have the data point of the White Witch being a woman who uses seduction to get her way. And isn’t she a stand in for the devil, or was I missing something?
Yeah, but Susan was already shown to be prone to talking herself out of belief in what she knew to be true if believing meant something difficult or uncomfortable or inconvenient. In Prince Caspian, when Aslan is leading them through the woods, remember? Lucy had been seeing him but no one else did, and once the others finally did start to see him Susan tells her something along the lines of “I truly believed it was him when you first saw him, but I convinced myself I didn’t because I just wanted to get out of these damn woods already.” Susan was set up from the second book in the series to be the one who lost her faith–or more accurately pushed her faith away because she thought it made life harder.
As has been pointed out, talking about magical lands where you were once a queen like it’s real isn’t really going to make you popular. It’s going to complicate achieving things like dating and having friends and all that sort of thing that a normal young woman typically wants in her life. Remaining a Friend of Narnia is basically following Aslan down the longer path through the woods–something that, while it’s the better choice in the long term, makes life seem massively more difficult in the short term. And just like that trek through the woods, Susan chose what seemed to be the easier path in the short term, even though it meant persuading herself out of belief.
But I don’t believe for a second that Susan was one of the hellbound. Shortsighted as she may have been, she had a good heart. Besides, in the woods she did finally admit to herself that Aslan really was there. If you look at that incident as a pattern for her later loss of faith in our world, it only stands to reason that she eventually had that same return to faith.