The Pagan Temptation, by Thomas Molnar (Eerdmans, 201 pp., $11.95)
I came upon this book the same week I began reading C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia to my children. What a happy coincidence! Won’t their encounter with a Golden Lion and a cunning White Witch, whose spell of perpetual winter without Christmas is broken at the cost of Aslan’s blood, be just the thing to help them overcome the evil enchantments of a paganism that, on Professor Molnar’s showing, haunts the age like a recurring bad dream? Paganism remains the one real rival to the faith of Christianity today. What better imaginative antidote to it than Lewis’s fairy tales: so many splendid stories strewn with glints of that Other Story, about which, to paraphrase his great friend Tolkien, there never was a tale told that men would rather find was true? To go to Narnia is to discover anew the immense and sundering truth of the Christian Tale, which the desiccated of our time have been too long without hearing.
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