Dominicrussell's Blog

Ginger the Cat.

Ginger is a large tom cat in the prime of his life.   Like other antagonists in Lewis’ work, has corrupted his gifts and succumbed to his weaknesses.  His laziness and quick feline intelligence has led him into an apostate theology. Confident, intelligent and ruthless he makes the mistake of calling on a God in whom he does not believe.

The story of the Last Battle starts with a monkey called Shift who dresses a donkey as a lion to imitate Aslan.  Intending to gain power, to make Narnia into a better place, better place being defined a place that suits his specific needs – oranges and bananas rolling in – but is soon out of his depth in dealing with the Calormen.

Ginger watches and intelligence allows him to realise and understand the deception as well as come to terms with the leader of the Calormen, Rishda Tarkaan, who like Ginger does not believe in his own God but seeks a materialist reward from the deception unlike Shrift who actually believes in Aslan, but is confident that he would not ‘turn up’.

Ginger and Rishda debate over the heads of the talking beasts agreeing that Tash is no more or no less than Aslan.  The funny thing about this is that Rishda is debating theology with a cat.  Think about it because if Aslan is not real how can there be talking cats?  If there are talking animals, very different from the animals in his own country who can not talk then there must, logically, be a reason for this and that reason is clearly Aslan.  But the funniest thing is that the advocate of the argument there is no Aslan is the talking cat.  Using intelligence and a voice is not usual for a cat, it is supernatural and a small supernatural phenomenon like a cat can only be derived from a larger supernatural creature.

After becoming a Christian Lewis agued that the strongest evidence for the existence of the supernatural is the human mind which is in nature but clearly is not part of nature and, very importantly, can not be shown to come from nature.  So Lewis uses this to mock very clever men at Cambridge and Oxford were arguing that there was no supernatural world and used reason to prove this.  The paradox of a cat using intelligence to disprove Aslan sends up all the clever rhetoric that proves there is no God.

Shifts foolish deception was bad enough but Gingers, his enlightened friends and the Calormen are worse.  They foresee a future of slavery, colonisation and exploitation for Narnia.  They want to terrify the Narnians for their own materialistic purposes.

Ginger does not benefit for long as he is called upon to prove that Aslan is in the stable.  Thinking that he would have a chance to show off and sure in the knowledge that the stable only contained a Calorman he is confronted by Tash who is as real as Aslan..  The result, as promised in “The Magicians Nephew” is that he loses his gifts and returns to being a dumb animal.  But the allegory here is keen because what Lewis is saying is that if we abandon God we lose our gift and stop being human, merely the trousered ape from “The Abolition of Man”.

Since I wrote this a nice Lady indicated that she thought that Ginger the cat and Ed have a lot in common.  I had to have a little think about this because my first impression was that I wanted to avoid political wrangling, despite being a tory and a hater of socialism etc, I wanted the blog to be more religious and philosophical than political.

However, I agree that Ed is very much like Ginger.  Ginger loses his ability to talk, think and be sentient because he undermines his own basis for being a person.  Ed is the leader of a socialist party who has rejected socialism.  By abandoning his values he has no basis for talking, no basis for thinking and no basis for being.  He is a candle in a storm.

This is important not just for politicians of socialist parties but also politicians of all parties.  Terry Pratchet writes in one of his Discworld novels that to be the best you have to focus on being the best.  Likewise to be a politician you need to be a politician and to be a leader of a philosophical movement you have to subscribe totally to that movement.  Our politicians are becoming mundane because they are all interested in power and use their thinking as a cloak for this rather than following their beliefs.
If you like these ideas can I recommend “the abolition of man” by CS Lewis to you.  In this he discusses the need for people to have values, standards and beliefs.