Was the Underlying Christian Theme Intended By Lewis?

Yes, it was intentional.

Yes, they werew entirely intentional, just look it up, it's all over the place.
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I'll teach you to laugh at something that's funny!

I believe Lewis created Aslan as a 'what if Jesus was a Lion in another fantasy world?' There are religious aspects to the books based on Christianity, especially since Lewis was so religious, but except for the resurrection scene in LWW, there are no allegories and the themes are general.

Bob

In short, the answer to the original question is, yes. However, there are some nuances to the issue.

A young reader once wrote to Lewis asking who Aslan is. Lewis was not explicit because he wanted the kid to guess, but it is most obvious from what he wrote he intended the child to guess that it was Jesus. I'm pretty sure you can find this letter in the short volume, CS Lewis: Letters To Children.

However, let me say too that Lewis did not begin each story with Christian goals, so this was not his *primary* purpose in writing the works. He said that he began by thinking of images and characters, such as the faun by the lamppost in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. He had been experimenting with stories of talking animals and mythic creatures since he was a little boy (some of his childhood stories have even been published as a book called "Boxen"--Boxen was a mystical land that was something of a prototype for Narnia). So his first priority was to create interesting characters and stories for children utilizing creatures that had always fascinated him. However, as a very strong believer in Christ and as someone then already famous as a lay theologian, Christian elements ended up working their way in as they do in most of his books. He interpreted so much of life and his own sense of morality and good values through his own personal faith, I suspect it would have been hard for him to write these stories without any Christian elements (not that he would have wanted to).

The ideas that did come to him, though, he clearly recognized as Christian and included as a way of retelling the Christian story. He once said that idea was something that appealed to him: if there really were other universes or non-earthly realms how would the Christian story play out there? After all he believed that Christ was Lord over all, so he believed if there were different realms then Christ would have to be Lord there too. You can get a sense of this philosophy or mind-set from his space trilogy too, especially in Perelandra, which is essentially a retelling of the Adam and Eve story set in Venus instead of Earth. (I recommend his space trilogy--I've personally always liked those books better than the Narnian stories.)

(Just to add also: the Boxen stories from Lewis' childhood that I mentioned seem to indicate your other point from a later reply was wrong: Lewis did not just rip off Tolkien in these books.)

[deleted]

From what I remember, he wanted to entertain a sick little girl--which is why he wrote the story in the first place. Once CS Lewis embraced a relationship with Christ, ALL of his writings reflected that conversion & following relationship. As he wrote in Of Other Worlds:

"Some people seem to think that I began by asking myself how I could say something about Christianity to children; then fixed on the fairy tale as an instrument, then collected information about child psychology and decided what age group I’d write for; then drew up a list of basic Christian truths and hammered out 'allegories' to embody them. This is all pure moonshine. I couldn’t write in that way. It all began with images; a faun carrying an umbrella, a queen on a sledge, a magnificent lion. At first there wasn't anything Christian about them; that element pushed itself in of its own accord."

As to the Daughters of Eve/Sons of Adam is is because they came from this world, which is where, if you're a creationist, the world & all its inhabitants began. As such, those are the two important characters in the Narnian world, as opposed to Biblical characters such as Moses, Abraham, etc.

I realise that this is a bit late but just on the off chance anyone is catching up with this thread they might find the link below interesting. It contains a letter by CSW dealing with this point:

http://www.hbook.com/magazine/articles/1960s/oct66_higgins.asp