Samuel Swenson-Reinhold --- Shasta, God and Plato's Forms

 Arguably my favorite book in Lewis' The Chronicles of Narnia, The Horse and His Boy is one that I saw saturated with religious language and theological statements. It resonated with me personally in the way that Lewis articulates his understanding of how God works in the life of people - and he does so brilliantly through a book written for children. The passage in the last third of the book was one that sat heavy with me, where Shasta is confronted by "a Voice" (Aslan) who details his presence in Shasta's life and journey from Calormen to Archenland. 

When Shasta is speaking to Aslan (or God, if you will) and Aslan is detailing how he's appeared in different forms to Shasta throughout his life, it made me think about some of our earliest class discussions on the topic of the Forms (Platonic). Our visual had shown a spectrum moving from the particulars to universals, and the closer one gets to the universals the closer one gets to Plato's conception of the Good. But Aslan, as God, is forced to show himself and participate in our lives through the particulars - like shaping himself as a house cat that guides Shasta, or a lion who scares away predators. Yet Aslan remains the universal, the form of the Good, if you will. What stands out to me here is that those situations - like Bree and Shasta getting chased by a lion who happens to have been Aslan - exist in "less" reality then than they do when Aslan lays out his presence for Shasta. Those experiences become profound in a way that they might not have been before, but it is only in retrospect that this is realized. 

Hopefully I articulated this well. What I'm trying to get at is how the Divine's presence in our lives might be understood in terms of the Forms. 

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