The Harrowing of Hell in Narnia

Fr Lawrence Lew OP

In our parish church there is a faded wall painting of Christ standing on what appears to be a slab of stone. Look more closely and you can see it’s actually a door that’s been flattened. Squashed underneath that door is the devil, much as you can see in the painting above. This is the Harrowing of Hell, which took place on Holy Saturday as we are reminded in the creed:

I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Creator of Heaven and earth; 
and in Jesus Christ, His only Son Our Lord, 
Who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried. 
He descended into Hell …

Holy Saturday is a strange, solemn day, caught between the events of Good Friday and Easter Sunday. It is, as an ancient homily puts it, a day of great silence and stillness:

Today there is a great silence over the earth, a great silence, and stillness, a great silence because the King sleeps; the earth was in terror and was still, because God slept in the flesh and raised up those who were sleeping from the ages. God has died in the flesh, and the underworld has trembled.

A day of great silence and stillness but a day of action as well for it was on this day that Christ stormed the gates of hell and freed Adam (and many others) from captivity. As that same homily puts it, placing words in Christ’s mouth as he speaks to Adam:

Awake, sleeper, I have not made you to be held a prisoner in the underworld.

So, does any of this seem familiar from the Chronicles of Narnia?

The answer (of course) is yes: in Chapter 16 of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Aslan enters the White Witch’s castle and wakes the sleepers from their statuesque sleep:

“Hush,” said Susan, “Aslan’s doing something.”

He was indeed. He had bounded up to the stone lion and breathed on him.

Notice Susan’s demand for quiet at the start of the passage. Notice too the power of Aslan’s divine breath. But the quiet doesn’t last long. Before long there is noise aplenty:

Everywhere the statues were coming to life. The courtyard looked no longer like a museum; it looked more like a zoo. Creatures were running after Aslan and dancing round him till he was almost hidden in the crowd… And instead of the deadly silence the whole place rang with the sound of happy roarings, brayings, yelpings, barkings, squealings, cooings, neighings, stampings, shouts, hurrahs, song and laughter.”

There are other indications beyond the awakening of the stone figures that this is the Narnian version of Holy Saturday and the Harrowing of Hell, for though the storming of the witch’s castle takes place after the Resurrection (as I have discussed elsewhere), the events parallel those in the many stories of the Harrowing of Hell which Lewis, the lecturer in English Literature, knew very well indeed.

To give just two examples, prisoners are set free (“Leave no corner unsearched. You never know where some poor prisoner may be concealed.”) and the castle gates (as in the picture above) are destroyed.

“Well then, Giant Rumblebuffin,” said Aslan, “just let us out of this, will you?”

“Certainly, your honour. It will be a pleasure,” said Giant Rumblebuffin. “Stand well away from the gates, all you little ’uns.” Then he strode to the gate himself and bang - bang - bang - went his huge club. The gates creaked at the first blow, cracked at the second, and shivered at the third. Then he tackled the towers on each side of them and after a few minutes of crashing and thudding both the towers and a good bit of the wall on each side went thundering down in a mass of hopeless rubble; and when the dust cleared it was odd, standing in that dry, grim, stony yard, to see through the gap all the grass and waving trees and sparkling streams of the forest, and the blue hills beyond that and beyond them the sky.

As I wrote before, Holy Saturday may seem to have disappeared from the Narnian account, on first glance, but it hasn’t really disappeared. It’s been displaced. Lewis took the once familiar story of the Harrowing of Hell (as he took the once familiar stories of the gospels) and made it strange in Narnia so that his readers could experience its wonder as if for the first time.

Of course, the Harrowing of Hell wasn’t just important to C. S. Lewis: Tolkien made creative use of it in various ways in The Lord of the Rings as well, though I oughtn’t to get distracted by them or we could be here all night, so I will content myself instead with wishing you all a very happy Easter!