The Last Battle

Aslan the lion is the Christlike god in The Chronicles of Narnia and the only character who appears in all seven books. Aslan is the powerful, mysterious, and loving guide to the English children sent on missions to help Narnia, as well as the benevolent creator of Narnia and its creatures. In sacrificing himself to save Narnia (in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe), Aslan is the opposite of the Calormenes’ “terrible god Tash who fed on the blood of his people” (36); where Tash is endlessly selfish and destructive, Aslan is endlessly loving. Aslan informs Emeth, a Calormene, that any good service is actually done for Aslan—an explanation for how people of other faiths or people who lived before Jesus’s time might nevertheless be “Christians” in practice. Nevertheless, Lewis stresses that Aslan is not “tame”; he is infinitely above and beyond the creatures he created and cannot be made to serve their ends.

Aslan’s eternal world, in which all goodness from the “Shadowlands” of imperfect England and imperfect Narnia survives in improved form, is the only real world because (in Christian theology) true life is only possible through God. Although Aslan typically appears in the shape of a lion (the “king of beasts”), by the end of The Last Battle, “He no longer look[s] to [the characters] like a lion” as they begin a brighter future in eternity (165).