Poor Liam Neeson
Image via WikipediaWhat Aslan Means to Liam Neeson
From a Daily Mail interview with actor Liam Neeson, the voice of Aslan in the Narnia films:
Aslan symbolises a Christ-like figure but he also symbolises for me Mohammed, Buddha and all the great spiritual leaders and prophets over the centuries.
That’s who Aslan stands for as well as a mentor figure for kids – that’s what he means for me.
Poor Liam Neeson. He can't win. He probably feels like he has to distance himself from the narrow, Christian message of The Chronicles of Narnia by recreating Aslan for himself in a more palatable, relativistic form to avoid upsetting the culture at large. And why not, if all that matters is what a text means to us, rather than what the author intended that text to mean?
But now he has upset Narnia fans, and with good reason. Neeson's image of Aslan as the god (or leader) of many different religions is quite explicitly argued against in The Last Battle when the Calormenes wrongly claim that Aslan and Tash (their god) are the same god, calling him "Tashlan."
I saw one person argue that Neeson is somewhat accuratebecause at the end of the book, Emeth, a Calormene, "recognizes Aslan as the Calormene god he'd been serving all along." But that isn't quite correct. Emeth doesn't discover that Aslan is Tash—the Calormene god he'd been serving; he discovers he wasn't serving the Calormene god at all, but he was instead serving Aslan, a very different god. While this is a message of inclusivism* that I don't endorse, it's still quite different from saying that Aslan was both of those gods, as Emeth discovered:
[Aslan said,] Child, all the service thou hast done to Tash, I account as service done to me...[Emeth replied,] Lord, is it then true, as the Ape said, that thou and Tash are one? The Lion growled so that the earth shook…and said, It is false. Not because he and I are one, but because we are opposites, I take to me the services which thou hast done to him.**
Mohammed did not pay the ransom for another person's sins. Neither did Buddha. Aslan, on the other hand, did this very thing, and this is meant to represent Jesus, plain and simple.
