By Susan Brinkmann, OCDS
Staff Journalist
Fans of C. S. Lewis’ classic tale, the Chronicles of Narnia, are furious after actor Liam Neeson claimed the tale’s hero, the lion Aslan, who is a symbol of Christ, can also symbolize other religious leaders such as Mohammed and Buddha.
London’s Daily Mail is reporting that Neeson, who plays the voice the lion in the films, made the comments during an interview about the upcoming release of the next movie, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, which opens today.
“Aslan symbolises a Christ-like figure but he also symbolizes for me Mohammed, Buddha and all the great spiritual leaders and prophets over the centuries,” Neeson said. “That’s who Aslan stands for as well as a mentor figure for kids – that’s what he means for me.’
The statement directly contradicts the intent of the author who once wrote of the character: “He is an invention giving an imaginary answer to the question, ‘What might Christ become like if there really were a world like Narnia, and He chose to be incarnate and die and rise again in that world as He actually has done in ours?’’
Lewis also claimed that the Narnia books are full of Christian symbolism, covering subjects such as heaven and the end of the world.
In the first book, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Aslan sacrifices his life to save Narnia from an evil witch before rising triumphantly from the dead. In subsequent books, Aslan appears often to steer the children away from evil and encouraging them to take the right paths.
Walter Hooper, Lewis’s former secretary and a trustee of his estate, said the author would have been outraged.
“It is nothing whatever to do with Islam,” he said. “Lewis would have simply denied that. He wrote that the ‘whole Narnian story is about Christ.’ Lewis could not have been clearer.”
Hooper speculated that Neeson’s remarks came out of a desire to be politically correct and “multicultural.”
“I don’t know Liam Neeson or what he is thinking about… but it was not Lewis’s intention,” Hooper said.
Neeson, 58, who was named after his parish priest, grew up in Ballymena, Northern Ireland, and is a practicing Roman Catholic. His wife, actress Natasha Richardson, died suddenly after a skiing accident in March, 2009.
William Oddie, a fomer editor of The Catholic Herald and a lifelong fan of the Chronicles of Narnia, accused Neeson of “a betrayal of Lewis’s intention and a shameful distortion.”
He said: “Aslan is clearly established from the very beginning of the whole cannon as being a Christ figure. I can’t believe that Liam Neeson is so stupid as not to know.”
The Chronicles of Narnia were written between 1949 and 1954 and follow the adventures of four siblings as they discover a magical land, full of talking beasts, unicorns and witches.
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is the third book to be made into a film, following The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe in 2005 and Prince Caspian in 2008.
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