The Chronicles of Narnia - The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe — Chapter 7

About This Passage

Lewis introduces the novel's central figure through what Rudolf Otto called the mysterium tremendum — the overwhelming mystery that both attracts and terrifies. The children's responses are Lewis's most compressed dramatization of his theology of encounter.

Narration Prompt

Give a concise summary, then identify the single most important sentence or moment and explain why it matters to the book as a whole.

Discussion Questions

1. Lewis introduces Aslan entirely through the children's involuntary emotional and physical responses — courage, beauty, excitement, horror — before a single visual detail is offered. In The Problem of Pain, Lewis defined the numinous as the experience of something wholly other that produces awe containing both dread and fascination. Evaluate whether the children's responses in this chapter constitute Lewis's most successful dramatization of the numinous in his fiction, and whether the technique of introducing the transcendent through affect rather than through description represents a genuine literary innovation or a theological shortcut.
2. Mr. Beaver's paradox — not safe but good — has become one of Lewis's most quoted formulations. Evaluate it as a theological claim: is Lewis arguing that divine goodness is inherently incompatible with human safety, that our concept of safety is too narrow to encompass genuine goodness, or that the desire for safety is itself a form of moral failure that prevents encounter with the good? Which reading does the novel's larger argument support?

+ 3 more questions in the complete study guide