Theologically Navigating Cinematic Multiverses with C. S. Lewis

The term “multiverse” has gained popularity in the last decade as a storytelling trope exploring alternate timelines based on different choices characters do, or could, make. Yet, while the term may have found popularity in recent years, particularly due to the popularity of the films in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, this existential thought process is not a new phenomenon to human existence, nor is the storytelling mode even new to films or novels. For decades storytellers have used these different techniques to explore this theoretical concept. In some instances, a single character can exist in multiple timelines, living a completely different life from his or her alternative self simply based on a different series of choices, as in the Oscar-winning film Everything, Everywhere, All at Once (2022).¹ In other instances, a character can travel through time and change history (whether it be the past or the future), altering their timeline for better or worse, as in the blockbuster films Avengers: Infinity War (2018) and Avengers: Endgame (2019).² In still other instances, a character may get stuck in a time loop and re-live a day, or a moment, over and over again, getting multiple chances to change their actions, like Phil Connors in Groundhog Day (1993) or Lola in Run, Lola, Run (1998).³ No matter the method, each of these story types allow characters to reexamine their lives with the potential to reconfigure historical events.

One major literary figure who utilized what we now call the multiverse in his stories was C. S. Lewis. His Chronicles of Narnia series explores the adventures of several children who travel back and forth between Lewis’s modern-day conception of London and the less familiar world of Narnia. The children make this journey through various means (“. . . don’t go trying to use the same route twice” the kindly Professor says at the end of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe)⁴ and somehow live parallel lives in these two worlds which seem to move through time at different speeds. Several hours in Narnia are equivalent to no time passing in London, and the passage of a year in London can see the passage of close to a thousand years in Narnia. As Eustace says in The Silver Chair, the time you spend in Narnia “doesn’t take up any of our time,” but when “you’re back in England—in our world—you can’t tell how time is going” in Narnia, for it “might be any number of years in Narnia while we’re having one year at home.⁵ The parallel worlds with alternate timelines allow Lewis’s characters an opportunity to experience trials and triumphs in Narnia that they would never experience in London, ultimately giving them a chance to develop into more mature, caring, and selfless versions of themselves in their “real,” original world.

Lewis also used a similar idea in his space trilogy of Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength.⁶ In these books, philologist Elwin Ransom travels to Mars and Venus and witnesses the lives of alien beings which challenge his conceptions of human superiority, goodness, and advancement. The other worlds also give him clearer access to the spiritual nature of the universe through his encounters with spiritual beings called Eldila that are not easily sensed on Earth. On Mars he witnesses a society older than Earth’s which has kept better communication with God, and on Venus a society younger than Earth which has not yet experienced the introduction of sin. These adventures give him the ability to return to Earth a changed man, and one that can help bring about moral resistance in the face of evil spiritual forces in, of all places, an English university campus.

Like popular films which explore multiple timelines or universes such as those in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Lewis’s books ultimately ask characters to make decisions which will impact the past, present, or future of one or more universes. My argument in this paper is that filmic multiverse narratives consistently challenge the perspective of their characters and force them to answer three morally charged questions: 1) how can I become a better person; 2) how can we become a better society; and 3) who can help us change? I will use both Lewis’s fiction and non-fiction to show that while filmic alternate realities often answer the first two questions in a similar way to Lewis by showing that there is a moral problem within the self and within society, Lewis’s answer to the third question, an incarnate God, does not match the self-reliant answers provided by the cinematic narratives.

The characters in all these stories are removed from the comfort and familiarity of their own time and place to find themselves in foreign worlds that may only vaguely resemble those of their homeland. This movement away from the commonplace and into the uncommon offers characters a chance to recognize certain problems they had either been running away from, ignoring, or were unaware of, and gives them an opportunity to change things for the better. Often, this happens through some sort of time travel which alters either the past, present, or future. However, even when no time travel is present, the trip to another universe or reality is ultimately a means to change the character’s situation in what they conceive as their natural homeland.

The fact that stories using a multiverse ask characters to enact some change to the status quo means that the characters must recognize some sort of problem that needs fixed. These problems can be those of the individual character, an antagonistic character, or those of society as a whole. In many instances it is the initiation into the other universe, or alternate timeline, which allows for the recognition of problems in all three categories. The recognition that there is a problem, or that something is not right with us or the world, is inherently a recognition that there is a standard of conduct which should be followed. C. S. Lewis is instructive here. In the opening section of Mere Christianity, Lewis lays out some common experiences to show how humans have an innate sense of right and wrong, and that we get frustrated when wrong wins over right. Lewis writes that “the moment you say that one set of moral ideas can be better than another, you are, in fact, measuring them both by a standard, saying that one of them conforms to that standard more nearly than the other. . . . If your moral ideas can be truer, and those of the Nazis less true, there must be something—some Real Morality—for them to be true about.”⁷ It is this reality that the multiverse helps cinematic characters realize.

A common refrain in theories of art is that great art challenges an audience to think outside of their normal patterns, helping them to analyze and question the structures and strictures they have grown accustomed to in life. Some of these theories come from a post-structuralist perspective, with the theorists attempting to deconstruct common societal ideas of reality, morality, and truth, things which the post-structuralists believe are false comforts which insulate an audience from truly experiencing the deeper realities of life. A major figure in this regard is Gilles Deleuze, whose works have highly influenced film and literary theory. Deleuze viewed art as a way to present life’s variances, or what he called life’s “flux,” which belie an underlying structure or, as he terms it, “stasis.” In this view the human desire to identify and create patterns ultimately leads to complacency and the inability to recognize how random, unplanned, and out of control life really is. Deleuze writes that “perhaps the highest object of art is to bring into play simultaneously all these repetitions . . . with their differences in kind and rhythm, their respective displacements and disguises, their divergences and decenterings.”⁸ In other words, life is anything but stable since people, time, and places are in a constant state of change. While humans attempt to view life in terms of stasis, reality is in constant, unpredictable flux, and art is a means to help bring this reality to the forefront.

David Deamer picks up on Deleuze’s notion that people, time, and locations are in a constant state of change and applies it to film in his examination of what he terms aexistempospatial cinema: i.e. the “ahuman, aspatial, and atemporal cinema of time travel, many worlds, and altered states.”⁹ Deamer wisely acknowledges that the term “aexistempospatial cinema” will most likely never catch on, but he does provide some groundwork from which studies of multiverse and time travel films can build. Of particular interest for my purposes is his analysis of how multiple timelines, character incarnations, and universes challenge the standard chronological conception of time that humans normally live with. Deamer writes that the narratives in these films are “initiated by a time travel situation concerning the past, the present, or the future. By way of each different temporal disruption, a new space is created other than the one that did exist, was existing, and was going to exist—creating diverse types of many worlds. Concomitantly, such displacements allow for encounters with varied states of being.”¹⁰ And for theorists who claim one of art’s major goals is to challenge human conceptions of reality, films which take a character out of their normal time, space, and consciousness are also ripe for challenging an audience in similar ways.

Lewis, though far from a deconstructionist, also believed that art was a means to break people out of their daily routines so they could experience something more fully real than they had ever experienced before. In An Experiment in Criticism, he poses the following question: “What then is the good of . . . occupying our hearts with stories of what never happened and entering vicariously into feelings which we should try to avoid having in our own person? Or of fixing our inner eye earnestly on things that can never exist?”¹¹ His answer is that art gives us “an enlargement of our being.” Our natural tendency is to see “the whole world from one point of view with a perspective and a selectiveness peculiar” to ourselves.¹² Art helps us to “see with other eyes, to imagine with other imaginations, to feel with other hearts, as well as with our own,” and this helps us “go out of the self” to correct our “provincialism and heal [our] loneliness.”¹³ Lewis makes similar comments in his essay “On Science Fiction,” in which he says that good stories are “additions to life; they give, like certain rare dreams, sensations we never had before, and enlarge our conception of the range of possible experience.”¹⁴ He then echoes the three-part space, time, and consciousness structure of Deleuze by referencing the difficulty in discussing these types of good stories with those who “refuse to be taken out of what they call ‘real life’—which means, perhaps, the groove through some far wider area of possible experience to which our senses and our biological, social, or economic interests usually confine us.”¹⁵ We see in this quote that Lewis believes good stories challenge our conceptions of consciousness, location, and time, and that this challenge is ultimately a thing for us to welcome and embrace rather than avoid.

The main difference between a thinker like Gilles Deleuze and one like C. S. Lewis is that Deleuze wants art to help us break free from what he would consider a man-made status quo which attempts to make sense of a world which does not make any sense, while Lewis wants art to help us break free from our limited, selfish ideas of what makes sense to embrace a more comprehensive understanding of God’s created and sense-filled world. Lewis’s friend and colleague J. R. R. Tolkien adds to Lewis’s thoughts by saying good stories help us to “clean our windows” so that:

The things seen clearly may be freed from the drab blur of triteness or familiarity—from possessiveness. Of all faces those of our familiars are the ones both most difficult to play fantastic tricks with, and most difficult really to see with fresh attention, perceiving their likeness and unlikeness. . . . We say we know them. They have become like the things which once attracted us by their glitter or their colour, or their shape, and we laid hands on them, and then locked them in our hoard, acquired them, and acquiring ceased to look at them.¹⁶

Therefore, Lewis and Tolkien believe stories help remind us that we do not have ownership over our time, locations, or consciousness, and that good stories help us to step outside ourselves to remember God’s Truth lives and exists outside of, even though it enters, time, space, or human consciousness.

This brings us back to Deamer’s aexistempospatial cinema which uses the narrative device of moving a character from one temporal and spatial location to another to challenge that character’s conception of reality—in Tolkien’s terms, to “clean their windows.” One major appeal of these stories, and the way they challenge a character’s conception of reality, is that they break with the normal human conception of time as a linear progression. In the fourth section of Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis devotes a chapter to comparing humanity’s conception of time with God’s conception of time. The explorative chapter, which Lewis titles “Time and Beyond Time,” gives us a good deal to think about in relation to the cinematic explorations of time that we find in multiverse, time travel, and time loop narratives. He writes that our “life comes to us moment by moment. One moment disappears before the next comes along: and there is room for very little in each. That is what Time is like.”¹⁷ God, on the other hand, “is not in Time” and, therefore, every moment “is always the Present for Him.”¹⁸ The experience of the characters in aexistempospatial cinema is a bit god-like in this sense. They step outside of the normal progression of time, witness or re-witness events they would not normally experience or re-experience and take actions which they can sense tangibly change history for the better. Yet, this movement out of time always has an eye back toward what the characters know as normal chronology. As Deamer notes, “while we encounter atemporality, we should not be surprised to find that the time travel narrations . . . reconstitute chronological order.”¹⁹

This ability to see the world outside of the normal time restrictions, in some sense, mirrors the nature of Christ’s incarnation. In Mere Christianity Lewis writes that you “cannot fit Christ’s earthly life in Palestine into any time-relations with His life as God beyond all space and time. . . . This human life in God is from our point of view a particular period in the history of our world. . . . We therefore imagine it is also a period in the history of God’s own existence. But God has no history. He is too completely and utterly real to have one.”²⁰ For Lewis, then, Jesus’ life, while functioning in history, and in some way limited by human bounds of time, space, and consciousness, is something God, who is beyond time, enters without losing his overarching outside-of-time vantage point. Christ’s actions in the first century are the actions of One who can experience those moments as they were occurring, in historical sequence, while also being able to see a much larger picture beyond the present moment. As Lewis states, if “you picture Time as a straight line along which we have to travel, then you must picture God as the whole page on which the line is drawn. . . . God, from above or outside or all round, contains the whole line, and sees it all.”²¹ Characters who traverse timelines or universes can see more than those they encounter in their normal world. They know something about the future or the past and have a very direct mission to accomplish to better themselves or society. Like Christ attempting to explain His mission to the disciples who consistently seem confused at His attempts to explain what is going to happen next, multiverse-traversing characters must live amongst others with a straightforward conception of time even though they have miraculously stepped outside of the normal time sequence. Moving outside the comforts of their normal space, time, and consciousness offers characters a better perspective from which to ask moral questions of themselves and the societies they inhabit.

The first moral question is about individual morality: how can I become a better person? Often the main characters in aexistempospatial films must recognize their own selfishness before learning to act in a selfless and sacrificial manner. Examples of this abound. The film It’s a Wonderful Life (1946)²² opens with George Bailey contemplating suicide because, in his mind, he is worth more to his family dead than alive. George’s moral failing in the film is self-pity, even at one time saying it would have been better if he had never been born. Since his business is bankrupt and he cannot raise the funds needed to save it, killing himself will at least ensure his family receive the money guaranteed in his life insurance policy. His attempt to end his life is stopped, though, through intervention by the angel Clarence. This spiritual intercession takes George on a trip through his own history, but also shows George examples of what life would have been like if he had never been born. Though George has often outwardly acted in selfless ways, he has maintained an unhealthy dose of self-pity, especially as it relates to leaving his hometown and making money. Access to this alternate timeline provides George with the extra knowledge necessary to see his moral failings, recognize the important contributions he has made to the world, and realize the importance of sacrifice and trust in living a fulfilling life. When George returns to his regular timeline in Bedford Falls, his countenance has changed, and his life, family, and business is saved.

Martin Scorsese’s much-discussed The Last Temptation of Christ (1988)²³ uses a similar method to reimagine the life of Jesus. In this film, Christ is far from a confident savior figure and is clearly confined to a strict understanding of sequential time. He does not foresee much of the future and is only given revelations from God moment by moment. He eventually knows he is supposed to die but does not know exactly why. Wracked with guilt and doubt, Jesus struggles with similar self-pity as George Bailey, but also maintains an interest in living for his own pleasure rather than for God’s will. The titular “last temptation” Christ experiences refers to a final invitation from Satan (in the guise of a young angel) for him to get down from the cross because he has “done enough” and does not actually have to go through with the crucifixion. Seeing this is just the next revelation from God, Jesus leaves the cross and proceeds to live a “normal” life. He marries Mary Magdalene, is widowed, and then marries Mary and Martha, has children with them, and raises his family. However, near the end of the film Judas chastises Jesus as the latter lies on his deathbed for forsaking his call and not following through with the crucifixion. The moment, which coincides with a Roman attack on the Jews, moves Jesus to ask God for another chance, which he is granted. Jesus goes back in time and returns to the cross to finishes his sacrifice. Whether this final act is a reversal of time or just the end to a vision of an unrealized future, Jesus’s vision of an alternate timeline reminds him of his call to sacrifice over selfishness. His mission was about living for others, not living for himself. His final act is one that overcomes the self-pity, guilt, and doubt he struggles with, and renews in him a sense of service to others.

Another example of individual moral growth in an aexistempospatial film comes from Looper (2012).²⁴ The story centers on a professional hitman named Joe who works for a crime syndicate from the future. After time-travel has been invented, and then outlawed, in the future, the mob illegally uses time machines to send people back in time to be “gotten rid of.” Joe is focused on doing his job, making as much money as he can, and enjoying himself in the process. He frequently uses drugs and does not much care about anyone else. Early in the film he decides to hand his only real friend over to the mob so that he can maintain his stash of money. However, one day an older version of Joe comes back in time so that the younger Joe can “close the loop” and kill his older self. Joe does not do this, in part because his selfishness makes it very difficult to kill even an older version of himself. Yet, this moment brings greater clarity to young Joe about what happens in the future, and the type of person he will become in thirty years. Older Joe’s main mission is to kill a young boy who will one day grow up to kill Joe’s wife and violently take over the mob. Thus, older Joe’s mission is driven by selfishness, and his selfishness is so prominent that he is even willing to kill multiple young children until he finds the right one. This realization allows young Joe a glimpse into the future, one in which he sees a cycle of violence in which he plays a large part. This gives him an opportunity to step outside of his own desires to see those of others. He decides to protect the young child and his mother and, rather than killing his older self, sacrifices his current self for the sake of others. This removes the threat of old Joe (for he cannot exist if his younger self has already died) and sets a new trajectory for future events with the hope that they will be altered for the better.

All three of the above films use alternate timelines to challenge the self-focused moral failings of the main characters and chart a new course for the future in which those characters are more selfless and sacrificial. It is the movement outside the standard sequential time sequence that challenges the characters’ consciousness and causes them to recognize how they can change for the better. This view from beyond the normal time limitations creates self-reflection and moral analysis. The characters are confronted with their moral failings, and they must choose whether or not to act to fix those moral failings.

Looper offers a transition point as we move from films focusing on the question of personal moral improvement to the next moral question: how can we become a better society? Most often aexistempospatial cinema answers this question through the conquering of an external foe whose nefarious actions are moving society away from accepted morality. The older Joe in Looper is an example of this, but since he is technically the same person as younger Joe it is hard to place that film squarely in this second category. Instead, a good film to start with is Superman (1978),²⁵ whose main villain, Lex Luthor, plans to redirect United States Army and Navy missiles to target the San Andreas Fault thereby causing significant damage to California. The character of Superman is an interesting study because he is originally from another planet and therefore can recognize many shortcomings about life on Earth that the human inhabitants cannot. He is also the only one aware of his supernatural strength, flying ability, and other superpowers, giving him an altered sense of space and consciousness from the men and women he encounters. On top of his ever-present sense of his home in another universe, the film Superman gives the character Superman a chance to alter history and create a new timeline of events. After Luthor’s missile strike partially succeeds, Superman saves many people but cannot save everyone, including his love interest, Lois Lane. Rather than letting this evil deed stand, Superman goes into outer space and flies fast enough around the Earth to reverse its orbit, sending the world back in time to before the missiles hit. In this alternate timeline Superman’s attempt to thwart the external threat of Lex Luthor is more successful. He saves even more lives, avoids the destruction from the missiles, and saves Lois from death. His actions also lead to Luthor’s arrest. Superman’s position as the one character who lives outside the normal bounds of time, space, and human consciousness puts him in a position to save mankind from the moral threat of Lex Luthor. While other characters can easily recognize Luthor as evil, only the character who lives beyond the normal conception of time can enforce moral change because he can both see alternative histories and can actually travel back and forth across time.

The Back to the Future films (1985–1990)²⁶ offer another example of a character fixing moral wrongs through aexistemposatial means. Through his various encounters with the Tannen family in the years 1885, 1955, 1985, and 2015, Marty McFly must travel through time to save his family from the morally corrupt ambitions of Biff, Griff, and Mad Dog Tannen. Whereas Superman’s character traits are pretty well set at the beginning of Superman, the Back to the Future series also provides Marty the chance to grow as an individual. In the first film, Marty’s accidental trip to the past leads to his need to convince his parents to fall in love with each other. This also coincides with his need to keep the evil Biff away from both his parents since he continually bullies his father and hits on his mother. The entire impetus for the film’s action is to maintain Marty’s future family—his entire existence depends on his parents falling in love. Since Marty is the only person in 1955 with knowledge of what is supposed to happen in 1985, he is the only person with the means to save the known future from corruption through the likes of Biff Tannen. Through the film Marty thwarts Biff while also gaining self-confidence and a greater appreciation for his parents. His actions in 1955 even help make 1985 a better, more morally correct place. In the second film Marty’s greed leads him to take a sports record book from 2015 back to 1985 in the hopes that it will lead him to financial gain. This plan, of course, backfires when the 2015 version of Biff gets ahold of the book and shares the information with his 1955 self. Biff’s success leads to shameless self-promotion, and his financial stranglehold on society in the updated version of 1985 leads Marty to another trip back in time to save his present reality from moral bankruptcy. Again, his knowledge of what the world could be like without Biff in charge gives him moral insight that no one else possesses in 1955 and leads to his ability to rescue the town from that tragic alternate timeline. The final film in the series takes Marty to 1885 where his internal moral failing is not knowing when to turn down a challenge and the external moral problem is Mad Dog Tannen’s violent rule over the wild west town. Again, Marty’s knowledge of the future allows for his ultimate victory as he reenacts scenes from future Clint Eastwood films to trick Mad Dog in the final showdown, and thereby uses his brains rather than his pride to win the fight, changing both his inner moral conflict and the outer moral conflict at the same time.

The final aexistempospatial film I will use is Arrival (2016),²⁷ which may provide the best example of a character fully moving outside of the normal sequence of time and into a similar “beyond time” reality that Lewis describes as God’s conception of time. Also making the film of interest when discussing the thoughts of C. S. Lewis is the fact that the film’s main character is a linguist hired by the American government to decipher the language of aliens who have recently arrived at several locations around the world. Like Elwin Ransom in Lewis’s space trilogy, linguist Louise Banks realizes that the aliens she encounters are not the enemy, humanity is. As she overcomes her fears of alien otherness, she also recognizes alien language functions differently than human language. Rather than sentences moving forward in a linear progression the alien language is circular, as if both the present, future, and past are all mingled into one. And if the concept of linguistic relativity—that your worldview and cognition is directly tied to your language—is correct, then learning the alien’s language may change a human’s cognitive functioning to the point of experiencing time as the aliens do. Thus, the film is also about how we experience the world in time. Our emotions, decisions, and relationships all happen in a linear timeframe in which we can remember the past but cannot see into the future. Our past experiences certainly play a role in our future decisions, but since we cannot see the future we cannot make decisions in the present based on any sure knowledge of what the future will bring. As Louise says at the beginning of the film, we are bound by time. But what if this were not the case? What if we experienced the world differently? What if our conception of time was more circular than linear? If we could somehow experience the events and pains of the future in the present, and experience them similar to the way we do memories, would we change any of it if we could? These are the questions Louise must wrestle with as she tries to convince the world’s military superpowers not to attack the alien spacecraft while also remembering (or foreseeing) the death of her daughter. Yet again, her ability to stop the moral problems of society rests on her ability to step outside of the normal human conception of time, and when she comes to learn the alien language, she is also able to experience events throughout time as if they were all happening simultaneously. Her ability to see the outcomes of different actions positions her to choose the best alternative for the film’s most decisive moment and allows her to save the world from intergalactic war.

What the above films showcase is that when characters are given insight into the ramifications of internal or external moral failings, along with the means to traverse time and space, these characters are able to improve themselves and society. Ultimately, the above narratives show internal and external moral struggles as things which human agents can overcome through will power or repetition. If a person only tries hard enough, or is given enough chances, that person will make the right decision. These narratives, then, align with a secular humanist worldview which sees man as the arbiter of morality and the agent of moral change. As Philip Kitcher writes in his book Life After Faith: The Case for Secular Humanism, for the secular humanist if “progress is viewed as problem solving, the concept of ethical progress proves coherent.”²⁸ However, solving these problems is not about “proximity toward some fixed goal,” but seen “in terms of ‘progress from’ rather than ‘progress to.’ ”²⁹ Therefore, they see life as an “ongoing project, always beset by difficulties and never finished,” a “thoroughly human endeavor in which progress is made by solving problems.”³⁰ The main characters described above all have access to an enlightenment beyond that of the other characters in their films and are, therefore, the characters who get to define the problems within themselves and society and also what makes for the best possible present, past, or future. They get to decide what progress looks like. They are also the only characters with the means to alter the timeline in a way that fits their worldview. Since they are able to see beyond time, they have the ability to control history. Even in films like It’s a Wonderful Life and The Last Temptation of Christ that introduce spiritual dimensions, the nature of the future solely depends on the actions of the human. In these films moral change is strictly a human endeavor, and one that humans get to define.

It is this worldview which ultimately separates the aexistemposatial films from the multiverse narratives of C. S. Lewis. Like the films noted above, Lewis’s characters certainly ask how to improve individually and societally. There are plenty of examples of the first kind. Edmund must recognize his selfishness and pride in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, while in Prince Caspian Lucy must learn to trust Aslan even if it means following him alone.³¹ In Voyage of the Dawn Treader King Caspian learns that leadership is not about personal glory but about sacrifice.³² In Out of the Silent Planet Ransom discovers that his human-centric thoughts devalue the alien creatures he encounters, and that he can learn more important lessons from them than they can from him. The list goes on as these four examples only touch the surface of the individual moral lessons learned by characters in Lewis’s fantasy novels. There are also numerous examples of characters attempting to fix the moral failings of external forces in society. The characters must do battle against enemy forces such as The White Witch, King Miraz, Devine and Westin, the N.I.C.E., evil Eldila, and the fake Aslan, all of whom are bent on shaping their respective worlds to align their own selfish ambitions.

Therefore, in Lewis’ stories the characters do recognize their own moral failings along with the failings of society. However, they are ultimately not the main impetus or agent of change either within themselves or in the worlds they inhabit. That distinction goes to the incarnate God-figure present within the stories because it is the incarnate God who alone stands outside of all time and space. The characters in Lewis’s stories may get to traverse between multiple worlds, but they are not able to control when they travel, how long they stay, or if they will ever make a repeat trip. Thus, it is Aslan alone in the Narnia chronicles who stands beyond time and space, and he alone who dictates when any character can travel from one world to another. This truth is evidenced in an exchange Aslan has with Jill in The Silver Chair. When Aslan tells Jill of a task he has for her they share the following dialogue:

“Please, what task, Sir?” said Jill.

“The task for which I called you and him here out of your own world.” This puzzled Jill very much. “It’s mistaking me for someone else,” she thought. She didn’t dare to tell the Lion this, though she felt things would get into a dreadful muddle unless she did.

“I was wondering—I mean—could there be some mistake? Because nobody called me and Scrubb, you know. It was we who asked to come here. Scrubb said we were to call to—to Somebody—it was a name I wouldn’t know—and perhaps the Somebody would let us in. And we did, and then we found the door open.”

“You would not have called to me unless I had been calling to you,” said the Lion.³³

Likewise, in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe Mr. Beaver informs Peter, Susan, and Lucy that their attempts to save their brother Edmund and Mr. Tumnus from the White Witch are futile on their own. He tells them that the “quickest way you can help . . . is by going to meet Aslan . . . once he’s with us, then we can begin doing things.”³⁴

It is also Maleldil (the name for God in what is called the Old Solar language) in Lewis’s space trilogy who is beyond all the planets and controls the innerworkings of them all. Ransom explains this reality in That Hideous Strength when he clarifies how the resistance group was assembled to combat the evil N.I.C.E:

“I am the Director,” said Ransom, smiling. “Do you think I would claim the authority I do if the relation between us depended either on your choice or mine? You never chose me. I never chose you. Even the great Oyeresu whom I serve never chose me. I came into their worlds by what seemed, at first, a chance; as you came to me—as the very animals in this house first came to it. You and I have not started or devised this: it has descended on us—sucked us into itself, if you like. It is, no doubt, an organization: but we are not the organisers. And that is why I have no authority to give any of you permission to leave my household.”³⁵

For Ransom, and for all the main characters in Lewis’s fiction, the all-powerful creator enters into time to solve the problems of his creatures. This action is one that involves the creatures but does not depend on them to reach its final achievement. All travels between the many worlds will one day end and all will be fulfilled in the perfect world. As Digory says in The Last Battle, the Narnia the children knew “was not the real Narnia” for 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: just as our own world, England and all, is only a shadow or copy of something in Aslan’s real world.”³⁶ The incarnate God is the only one who can really help his creatures overcome their own moral failings and the failings of their society. He is also the only one who will make everything right in the end, standing outside the many timelines in the many worlds of Lewis’s stories, and yet somehow participating in those timelines.

Aexistempospatial cinema affords its characters an opportunity to step outside their conceptions of time, space, and consciousness to fix themselves and their world. It also affords its audience a chance to examine our own place within time, and to recognize our connection to our ancestors, our descendants, and our creator. Russian Orthodox theologian Vladimir Lossky, as he was walking through war-torn France and reflecting on the horrors of the Second World War, came to understand something that aexistempospatial stories, particularly those of C. S. Lewis, can help us understand. He writes the following:

As for this catastrophe, who can save us from it? England? . . . America? . . . Russia? . . . No one except God. God alone. For the interconnected sequence of our faults does indeed extend back very far, even as far back as the sin of Adam. Yet this chain, this horizonal line that we call history, was broken at a given moment more than 1,900 years ago by another line, one that was vertical. God became Man, descending even to the infernal abyss so as to give us the power to escape from this interminable chain of faults and to rise above history. The intersection of these two lines forms the shape of the Cross. By accepting our historical catastrophe in all its horror, as our own cross given to us by God, we will find a way out, the only way: the vertical line that leads up to God.³⁷

The popularity of the multiverse speaks to this reality. It is a recognition that our conceptions of time and space are limited, and that this linear conception of time we live under is only temporary. And it is a recognition that the only One who can save us is the One who lives beyond, but still enters into, time. While humans certainly have a role to play in shaping their individual and social morality, Lewis’s work reminds us that it is God’s direction and help which makes any such moral change possible.

Cite this article

Bryan Mead, “Theologically Navigating Cinematic Multiverses with C. S. Lewis”, Christian Scholar’s Review, 54:2 , 7-20

Footnotes

Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, Everything, Everywhere, All at Once (A24, 2022).
Anthony Russo and Joe Russo, Avengers: Infinity War (Marvel Studios, 2018); Anthony Russo and Joe Russo, Avengers: Endgame (Marvel Studios, 2019).
Harold Ramis, Groundhog Day (Columbia Pictures, 1993); Tom Tykwer, Run, Lola, Run (X-Filme Creative Pool, 1998).
C. S. Lewis, The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe (Collier Books, 1970), 187.
C. S. Lewis, The Silver Chair (Collier Books, 1970), 37–38
C. S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet (The Bodley Head, 1938); C. S. Lewis, Perelandra (The Bodley Head, 1943); C. S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength (The Bodley Head, 1945).
C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Harper Collins, 2001), 13.
Gilles Deleuze, Differences and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (Continuum, 2004), 365.
David Deamer, “Deleuze’s Three Syntheses Go to Hollywood: The Tripartite Cinema of Time Travel, Many Worlds and Altered States,” Film-Philosophy 23, no. 3, (2019): 328.
Deamer, “Deleuze’s Three Syntheses Go to Hollywood,” 329.
C. S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism (Cambridge University Press, 2010), 137.
Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism, 137.
Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism, 137.
C. S. Lewis, “On Science Fiction” in C. S. Lewis Essay Collection: Literature, Philosophy and Short Stories (Harper Collins, 2000): 51.
Lewis, “On Science Fiction,” 51.
J. R. R. Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories” in The Monsters and the Critics (Harper Collins, 2006), 146.
Lewis, Mere Christianity, 168.
Lewis, Mere Christianity, 167.
Deamer, “Deleuze’s Three Syntheses Go to Hollywood,” 335.
Lewis, Mere Christianity, 168.
Lewis, Mere Christianity, 168.
Frank Capra, It’s a Wonderful Life (Liberty Films, 1946).
Martin Scorsese, The Last Temptation of Christ (Universal Pictures, 1988).
Rian Johnson, Looper (TriStar Pictures, 2012).
Richard Donner, Superman (Dovemead Films, 1978).
Robert Zemeckis, Back to the Future (Universal Pictures, 1985); Robert Zemeckis, Back to the Future Part II (Universal Pictures, 1989); Robert Zemeckis, Back to the Future Part III (Universal Pictures, 1990).
Denis Villeneuve, Arrival (Lava Bear Films, 2016).
Philip Kitcher, Life After Faith: The Case for Secular Humanism (Yale University Press, 2014), 42.
Kitcher, Life After Faith, 42.
Kitcher, Life After Faith, 42.
C. S. Lewis, Prince Caspian (Collier Books, 1970).
C. S. Lewis, Voyage of the Dawn Treader (Collier Books, 1970).
Lewis, The Silver Chair, 18–19.
Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, 76.
Lewis, That Hideous Strength, 243.
C.S. Lewis, The Last Battle (Collier Books, 1970), 169.
Vladimir Lossky, Seven Days on the Roads of France: June 1940 (St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2012), 71.