Modelling the Fear of God in C.S. Lewis's the Chronicles of Narnia

Authors

Brett Roscoe, The King's University, EdmontonFollow

Artists and Illustrations Included in This Record

N/A

Abstract

This article employs insights from cognitive approaches to literature to study how The Chronicles of Narnia evoke a religious affect known in the Christian tradition as the “fear of the Lord.” It first does what Guillemette Bolens calls a "kinesic analysis" of the books, focusing on the gestures, movements, and facial expressions related to the fear of Aslan, and then it interprets this fear in the context of Rudolf Otto’s The Idea of the Holy, a book C. S. Lewis claims had a large influence on him. Lewis, like Otto, was concerned with religious experience, specifically with how his readers “feel about God,” and in The Chronicles of Narnia he models the biblical fear of God, a feeling he portrays as analogous to, though significantly different from, regular fears.

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.

ORCID ID

0009-0009-0076-9948