The Work
The Last Battle was published by The Bodley Head on September 4, 1956, and received the Carnegie Medal - the UK's most prestigious children's literature award - the same year. It is the seventh and final volume of the Chronicles of Narnia. At approximately 200 pages, it narrates the last days of Narnia: the rise of the false Aslan (the donkey Puzzle dressed in a lion's skin, exploited by the ape Shift), the final battle between the Narnians and the Calormene-allied apostates, the dissolution of Narnia, and the entry of the faithful into 'the real Narnia' - the Aslan's Country that is the perfected fulfillment of everything the old Narnia had been.
The book is theologically the densest in the series and the most overtly eschatological. Lewis stated explicitly that it was his attempt to render the imagery of Revelation - particularly chapters 21-22 - in the language of children's literature, translated through the mythological world of Narnia rather than presented in the biblical imagery of Patmos.
Biblical Engagement
Revelation 21:1 - 'And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea' - is the primary text for the final movement of the book. Aslan shuts the door of the stable (the portal between worlds), the stars fall, giants come to stamp out the sun, the seas rise over the land, and Narnia ceases to exist. This sequence is Lewis's rendering of Revelation 20:11 ('And I saw a great white throne, and him that sat on it, from whose face the earth and the heaven fled away') and the dissolution of the old world before the appearance of the new.
John 14:2 - 'In my Father's house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you' - is the theological foundation of the book's cosmology of the stable that is larger inside than out. The stable that the Calormenes use as the false Aslan's oracle is, for the faithful, the threshold of Aslan's Country - the 'real' world that contains the 'real' Narnia, the England, the real everything. 'It's in there, the stable isn't!' says Lucy. The stable is the world; Aslan's Country is the Father's house that Christ has prepared.
Matthew 25:32-33 - 'And before him shall be gathered all nations: and he shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats: And he shall set the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on the left' - is enacted in the judgment scene where the creatures of Narnia pass through the door in the darkness and encounter Aslan's face. Those who look at him with love are gathered to his right; those who look at him with fear and hatred pass into his shadow and disappear. The separation is not primarily doctrinal but dispositional: it is about how the heart orients itself when it faces the divine.
Revelation 22:5 - 'And there shall be no night there; and they need no candle, neither light of the sun; for the Lord God giveth them light: and they shall reign for ever and ever' - provides the quality of light and life in Aslan's Country. The old Narnia grows more beautiful as the children run further in, and the cry 'Further up and further in!' is Lewis's rendering of the inexhaustible escalation of joy that Revelation 22 describes.
The figure of Emeth, the Calormene soldier who served Tash (the Calormene god) his entire life but who is found in Aslan's Country because his heart's true desire was always for goodness and truth - Aslan tells him 'all the service thou hast done to Tash, I account as service done to me' - is Lewis's most provocative engagement with the question of salvation outside explicit Christian faith. The theology draws on John 1:9 ('the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world') and the tradition of 'anonymous Christianity' or 'implicit faith.' It is Lewis's imaginative exploration of the question Paul raises in Romans 2:14-15 (Gentiles who do by nature the things of the law).
Author and Context
Lewis completed The Last Battle in 1954, at roughly the same time he was transitioning from Oxford to Cambridge and was in the full maturity of his creative powers. The book reflects several decades of thinking about eschatology - about what it means for history to have an end, for the created world to be temporary, and for the permanent to be more real than the transient.
The Platonic framework - 'shadow' and 'substance,' copy and original - that underlies the book's cosmology of the 'real Narnia' is a translation of his medieval and Renaissance scholarship into popular form. The medieval understanding of the created world as a shadow of the eternal world - derived from Plato but Christianized through Augustine and developed throughout the medieval period - finds its most accessible expression in the final chapters of The Last Battle.
The immediate theological concern was to present the Christian hope of resurrection and new creation in a way that would be emotionally convincing rather than merely intellectually accepted. Most readers, Lewis believed, did not find the Christian doctrine of the resurrection of the body and the new creation emotionally satisfying - it seemed too much like an endless church service or an amorphous spiritual state. The Last Battle was his attempt to render the joy and concreteness of resurrection hope in terms that children could feel and remember.
Key Scenes
The judgment scene (Chapter 14) is the book's theological climax. The creatures of Narnia, streaming through the door in the darkness, encounter Aslan at the threshold. 'Their eyes met his; some of them grew brave and beautiful, and some of them - and then they slipped to one side. And the children couldn't make out what happened to them.' Lewis is deliberately mysterious about the judgment's nature: it is not a verdict pronounced but a response revealed.
The 'real Narnia' speech by the Professor (Digory Kirke, now elderly) in Chapter 15 summarizes the Platonic eschatology: 'When Aslan said you could never go back to Narnia, he meant the Narnia you were thinking of. But that was not the real Narnia. That had a beginning and an end. It was only a shadow or a copy of the real Narnia which has always been here and always will be here... You need not mourn over Narnia, Lucy. All of the old Narnia that mattered, all the dear creatures, have been drawn into the real Narnia through the Door.' This is Lewis's rendering of 2 Corinthians 4:18: 'we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal.'
Critical Reception
The book was both praised and criticized. The Carnegie Medal confirmed its excellence as children's literature. Philip Pullman, Lewis's principal literary critic, found the theology of the book's ending - in which the children are in Aslan's Country because they have died in a railway accident - offensive and manipulative, arguing that Lewis was presenting death as a gift. The controversy about Susan's exclusion from Narnia (she is not present at the final gathering because she has 'grown up' into adolescent concerns) has been extensively debated by feminist critics.
Legacy
The Last Battle is the most eschatologically sophisticated children's book in the English language. Its rendering of new creation theology in imaginative terms accessible to children has shaped the faith imagination of several generations of readers. Its treatment of the judgment - oriented around the character of the heart's response to Aslan's face rather than around creedal compliance - has been theologically influential as a model for a dispositional rather than merely propositional account of salvation.
Reading Alongside Scripture
Readers should study Revelation 20:11-22:5 (the final judgment and new creation), 1 Corinthians 15:35-58 (the resurrection body and the new creation), 2 Corinthians 4:16-18 (the eternal weight of glory), Matthew 25:31-46 (the judgment of the nations by the Son of Man), John 14:1-6 (the many rooms in the Father's house), and Romans 2:14-15 (those who do by nature the things of the law).
Further Reading
- Paul F. Ford, Companion to Narnia (revised 2005) - the comprehensive reference guide to all seven books. - Michael Ward, Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C.S. Lewis (2008) - argues that The Last Battle is organized around the planet Saturn and its associated imagery of time, age, and endings. - C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory (1941) - the sermon that most directly expresses the theology of desire and eschatological hope that The Last Battle embodies in narrative.