The Silver Chair (Chronicles of Narnia): Praying to Aslan, Facing East

After many years, I’m rereading the Chronicles of Narnia.  Voyage of the Dawn Treader, and The Silver Chair, are the stories I best remember, in large part due to the BBC dramatizations from the early 1990s, of which I especially appreciated The Silver Chair.  So, to this day, I still have mental pictures of the young teenagers who played Eustace and Jill, and of course Tom Baker (who I remembered and loved from my earlier Dr. Who fandom days, in his 7 years as the 4th Doctor) as Puddleglum.  The BBC versions were low-budget compared to Hollywood movies, but quite faithful to the original stories, and provided 3 hour renditions of both The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe and The Silver Chair, giving short shrift of only 1 hours to Prince Caspian and 2 hours to Voyage of the Dawn Treader.  The last one in this BBC mini-series, The Silver Chair, was the best quality in my opinion.

Reading the books again is a good refresher, to include parts omitted or slightly changed in the 3 hour BBC version; the audio book of The Silver Chair is slightly over 5 hours, so at least the 3 hour dramatization gets relatively close, as compared to most movie dramatizations of popular books.

The descriptions of The Experiment House are classic C.S. Lewis comments against the problems of modernism and progressivist, anti-Christian thought, that was one of Lewis’ key focus throughout his fiction and non-fiction writings.  I’m also noticing how Jill, early in the adventure, complains a lot and desires the comforts of home such as a bed with blankets and hot baths.  That strong desire for comfort indeed becomes a major failure and plot point, how they end up at the giants’ castle and then have to escape from it.  This same desire for comfort and dislike for adventure, of course, is also brought out regarding Bilbo Baggins in The Hobbit — though not to the extreme exhibited by Jill and even Eustace, to the point of wrong, sinful choices made in order to achieve the desired comfort.

Another interesting point I had forgotten, but now note the significance of:  behind the gym, when Eustace in conversation with his classmate Jill considers formally asking Aslan if they can go to Narnia, he makes a special point about the proper position for making such a request.  Their request is in effect a type of prayer, though Lewis never uses the actual term prayer.  But a petition is certainly a large part of what is involved in prayer.    How Aslan should be asked, included hands stretched forward with palms down — as Eustace had observed done on Ramandu’s Island near the end of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader — and facing to the east.

As an aside, this scene also is one of the examples cited by modern feminists and secularists, of the supposedly sexist dialogue in C.S. Lewis’ writing:  Eustace’s line to Jill, that girls don’t know their direction on a compass.  Not mentioned by these critics, is Jill’s retort that Eustace himself obviously didn’t know — at that particular location they were at — which direction was east; and later in the story, the narrator author admits that he does not know if such lack of compass directions is true of all girls, but that it was true for Jill in particular.

In all my years growing up as a Protestant Christian, then coming to saving faith as a Protestant (Evangelical) Christian as a young adult and the many years since then as a Protestant Christian, I had never known the significance of facing east in prayer.  (I had heard this about cemetery plots, but nothing else.)  In prior readings of The Silver Chair I probably attributed this point to the internal plot of the Narnia story itself, since in the previous book, Voyage of the Dawn Treader, the characters did indeed quite literally sail East to Aslan’s country.  However, as I recently learned, as part of my study of Eastern Orthodox Christianity (the faith of the early church and its adherents to this day), it has always been a significant part of Orthodox Christian practice to pray facing this particular compass direction, of East.  Just as in Judaism before it, synagogues would face the direction of Jerusalem and the direction of East was held in high regard, and as the men of Gondor in Middle Earth turned in the specific direction of West toward Numenor in their prayer and moment of silence (link: previous post), the early Church saw significance of praying to the East.  As St. Basil observed in the 4th century (in his work, On the Holy Spirit):

For example, let us especially make note of the first and commonest thing: that those who hope in the Name of our Lord Jesus Christ should sign themselves with the Sign of the Cross. Who taught this in Scripture? Which Scripture instructed us that we should turn to the east in prayer? …Is this not the silent and secret tradition?   … Is it not from this unpublished and unspoken teaching which our Fathers have preserved in a silence inaccessible to curiosity and scrutiny, because they were thoroughly instructed to preserve in silence the sanctity of the Mysteries [i.e., Sacraments]? For what propriety would there be to proclaim in writing a teaching concerning that which it is not allowed for the unbaptized even to behold?

For further explanation of why the early Church (and Orthodoxy to this day) face East in their prayers, here are two helpful articles:  Why Orthodox Churches Face East and Why do the Altars of Orthodox Churches Face East? 

Returning to C.S. Lewis and this story detail (the children facing East when making their petition to Aslan):  I find this interesting, as another piece fitting quite well into the picture of C.S. Lewis as being closest in his beliefs to Eastern Orthodoxy, as I also have recently learned from other online sources.  For further reference, here is a podcast episode and an article regarding C.S. Lewis’ beliefs and Eastern Orthodoxy.

I’m still re-reading The Silver Chair, and looking forward to finding even more story incidents that allude to early church practices.  I already know about this one (near the end of The Silver Chair), mentioned in this free online book Know the Faith: A Handbook for Orthodox Christians and Inquirers:

In C.S. Lewis’s The Silver Chair, from his Chronicles of Narnia series, we encounter a beautiful description of a most natural, God-inspired act of icon veneration. Finding his formerly blackened shield now immaculate and revealing the blood-red image of the lion (Aslan, Lewis’s Christ figure), Prince Rilian addresses his small band of fellow travelers: “Now by my counsel, we shall all kneel and kiss his likeness, and then all shake hands one with another, as true friends that may shortly be parted.” The solemn act of love and reverence for the one who had delivered them from the delusion of the green witch was appropriately followed by acts of reconciliation and forgiveness.

I welcome any reader thoughts here — your thoughts about the Narnia movies (either the BBC series or other versions), as well as your comments about the overall story.