Tool Alpha
C. S. Lewis’s Cosmology
Where Lewis’s heavens follow Scripture, where they come from the medieval picture of the cosmos, and where he made them up.
Aslan sings Narnia into being
In The Magician's Nephew, Narnia is made by a song. The stars appear singing, and the Lion's voice calls the land, the animals and the waters into being.
Job 38:4-7, in every translation this tool compares.
The real question: why does Lewis have Narnia made by singing? A song and a speech can say the same words. One is heard as a command, the other as something beautiful. Genesis has God speak. Lewis has Aslan sing. What that choice keeps from the Bible and what it adds is the question.
In the dark of the unmade world a Voice begins to sing. Stars appear at the moment the high voices begin, and Digory is certain "it was the stars themselves which were singing," made to appear and sing by the First Voice. The singing Lion then calls up the land, plants and animals, and finally speaks: "Narnia, Narnia, Narnia, awake. Love. Think. Speak."
In Job 38 God asks where Job was when he laid the foundations of the earth, when the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy. Genesis 1 and Psalm 33 have creation by God's spoken word.
The singing stars at the founding of the world are Job 38:7. Creation by the voice is Genesis 1 and Psalm 33. Making the creative word a song is Lewis's own.
Scripture has the stars sing while God creates. Lewis has the creator sing. The Bible never calls God's creative word a song.
Not a different creation story. Narnia is a separate world in the fiction, but the shape, a voice in the dark and a world appearing at its word, is the shape of Genesis 1.
- Lewis, The Magician's Nephew (1955), chs. 8-9
