Partnership with God

Follow-up to: Absent: One Lion

Brother Yudkowsky has discussed at length a number of rules for designing good utopian fiction (and, indeed, good fiction at all). One of the points that he made was that people need to be capable of being protagonists in their own life stories rather. If, if your own life, you have been reduced to the role of supporting cast because you can exert no appreciable influence on the outcome of events, well, then, something is wrong. To put it in Mormon terms, we are supposed to be agents that act out our wills, rather than objects to be acted upon.

To illustrate this idea he brought up several stories, among which was The Chronicles of Narnia. He felt that Aslan made the Pevensies superfluous and that, because Narnia would have been saved with or without them (indeed, with or without anyone but Aslan), they were made supporting cast and had suffered, so to speak, an "amputation of destiny."

While I do support his general idea, I don't agree that the Pevensies got nothing out of the deal. The key is in looking at the Chronicles as a bildungsroman (indeed, in looking at our own lives as each a bildungsroman). The conflicts are not important. What is important is how each child reacts to the conflicts that they encounter: Edmund, for example, turns traitor then repents himself, and seems to keep this episode in mind from then on and give second chances to others. Perhaps Susan's desire to grow up so quickly stemmed from those years in Narnia when she was no slip of a girl but a royal queen.

The point is that the story isn't what Aslan could or couldn't do without the Pevensies- or what God can or can't do without us. The entire history of the world is full of God working with men and women to accomplish His purposes, not so much because He cannot do it alone but because, by becoming co-creators and participants in the drama, we are afforded an opportunity for growth that we would otherwise not receive.

Absent: One Lion quite clearly states that Narnia was saved without the intervention of the Pevensies. Narnia did not need them. But the Pevensies needed Narnia, and we need God, to develop fully.