Mary Stubberfield
In The Lion’s World: A journey into the heart of Narnia, Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, asks, “If Aslan and the emperor are images of the divine Son and the divine Father, what has happened to the Holy Spirit?”
He then quotes “the beautiful passage” in The Horse and His Boy where Shasta asks the unseen Aslan who he is:
“Myself,” said the Voice, very deep and low so that the earth shook: and again, “Myself”, loud and clear and gay; and then the third time, “Myself” whispered so softly you could hardly hear it, and yet it seemed to come from all around you as if the leaves rustled with it.
If this is a Trinitarian reference, Williams isn’t entirely happy with it, so perhaps I can offer another example of the Holy Spirit in the Chronicles of Narnia. This one comes very close to the start of the series when a robin leads the Pevensie children to the beavers in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. In Paths in the Snow, Jem Bloomfield gives a convincing reading of this passage that links The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and The Secret Garden but I think another reading is possible, one which takes us forward to a cat in The Horse and His Boy and then back to a robin in The Book of Margery Kempe.
First, The Horse and His Boy. Shortly before the passage quoted by Williams, we find this explanation from Aslan of earlier events in the novel:
I was the lion who forced you to join with Aravis. I was the cat who comforted you among the houses of the dead. I was the lion who drove the jackals from you while you slept. I was the lion who gave the Horses the new strength of fear for the last mile so that you should reach King Lune in time. And I was the lion you do not remember who pushed the boat in which you lay, a child near death, so that it came to shore where a man sat, wakeful at midnight, to receive you.
It's one of my favourite passages in the whole series. There’s the comfort of knowing that Aslan has been there all along, the beauty of the last sentence, and the surprise when we discover what we had perhaps not guessed before: that the boat did not simply drift to shore by chance. But the part I want to draw attention to here is the sentence about the cat. Aslan was that cat. He took another form and comforted Shasta, which takes us back to The Book of Margery Kempe, written in the 15th century and discovered in the 1930s when someone trod on a table tennis ball and rooted around in a cupboard to find a replacement. Here’s a passage from Book One, Chapter 36:
Thys creatur had divers tokenys in hir bodily heryng. On was a maner of sownde as it had ben a peyr of belwys blowyng in hir ere. Sche, beyng abasshed therof, was warnyd in hir sowle no fer to have for it was the sownd of the Holy Gost. And than owr Lord turnyd that sownde into the voys of a dowe, and sithyn he turnyd it into the voys of a lityl bryd whech is callyd a reedbrest that song ful merily oftyntymes in hir ryght ere. And than schuld sche evyrmor han gret grace aftyr that sche herd swech a tokyn. And sche had been used to swech tokenys abowt twenty-five yer at the writyng of this boke. Than seyd owr Lord Jhesu Crist to hys creatur, “Be thes tokenys mayst thu wel wetyn that I love the, for thu art to me a very modir and to al the world for that gret charité that is in the, and yet I am cawse of that charité myself, and thu schalt have gret mede therfor in Hevyn.”
And here it is in a vaguely modern translation:
This creature [i.e Margery herself] had various tokens in her bodily hearing. One was a sort of sound like a pair of bellows blowing in her ear. Being abashed by this, she was warned in her soul to have no fear, for it was the sound of the Holy Ghost. And then Our Lord turned that sound into the voice of a dove, and later on, He turned it into the voice of a little bird which is called a red-breast, that often sang in her right ear. And she would always have great grace after hearing such a token. She had been used to such tokens for about twenty-five years, at the time of writing this book. Then Our Lord Jesus Christ said to His creature, “By these tokens you may know that I love you, for you are a very mother to me, and to all the world, for that great love which is in you, and yet I am the cause of that love Myself, and so you shall have great reward in Heaven.”
So the Holy Spirit can be sensed in the sound of the wind (of the bellows) and in the voice of a dove. They are relatively conventional images. The voice of the robin, though, is more unexpected. Maybe this passage, as well as the ones from The Secret Garden, was in Lewis’s mind when he wrote about the robin in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Maybe the Holy Spirit, like Aslan, is a largely invisible, but ever-present, character in the Chronicles of Narnia. Maybe we simply need our eyes to be opened to what (and who) has been there in front of us all along.
(And if you want to read more, maybe this soon-to-be-published book may help. I know nothing about it but it looks intriguing.)