A darker ignorance: C. S. Lewis and the nature of the fall

Mythlore, Summer, 2003 by Mary R. Bowman

Assuredly we bring not innocence into the world, we bring impurity much rather: that which purifies is trial, and trial is by what is contrary. That virtue therefore which is but a youngling in the contemplation of evil, and knows not the utmost that vice promises to her followers, and rejects it, is but a blank virtue, not a pure. (Milton, Areopagitica 728-29)

WITH the recent publication of the last volume in Philip Pullman's His ark Materials trilogy, C. S. Lewis has received a new wave of publicity--largely negative--as numerous articles and interviews have recorded Pullman's dislike of Lewis's work, especially the Narnia series. While his opinions are to a large extent a matter of taste and to that extent not matter for scholarly concern, some of his remarks reflect interpretations of Lewis's work that merit further exploration.

One issue that comes up repeatedly in Pullman's comments is the absence of Susan from the "inner" Narnia where the rest of the English visitors to Narnia find themselves reunited at the conclusion of The Last Battle. Pullman objects mightily to Susan's "exclusion" and what it seems to imply about Lewis's attitudes toward adulthood. Susan, he claims, "is shut out from salvation because she is doing what every other child who has ever been born has done--she is beginning to sense the developing changes in her body and its effect on the opposite sex" (qtd. in Eccleshare). In Pullman's interpretation, the adult nature of Susan's interests is the crucial point, and her being "shut out" reflects Lewis's profound disapproval, even horror, of maturation: "he turns away in horror, explicitly with horror, from the process of growing up." This disapproval, moreover, has a dear religious source and significance: "'In other words, she's growing up. She's entering adulthood,' says Pullman. 'Now this for Lewis, was something [...] so dreadful and so redolent of sin that he had to send her to Hell'" (qtd. in Wartofsky). "What he's saying," Pullman concludes, "is that growing up is something we must avoid at all costs, that when you grow up you fall into the clutches of, well, lipstick and nylons, which means sexuality, which means Satan [...]" (Pullman).

I will eventually argue that this interpretation is misguided, but it is a valuable one to consider, not only because it has appeared so frequently in the popular press, but also because it raises important issues in Lewis's work and brings together elements that criticism has not often connected. This interpretation is, in fact, a viable one, but it takes certain statements out of context and, more significantly, relies on certain crucial assumptions: assumptions about the nature of sin, the nature of the original prohibition, and about the incompatibility of wisdom with innocence. Readers familiar with Pullman's His Dark Materials fiction will recognize a consistency between his comments on Lewis and the cosmology that informs his own books, and while it is not my purpose here to debate the theological issues themselves, I submit that it is essential in interpreting (and evaluating) Lewis's fiction to attempt, at least, to identify the theological assumptions implicit within that fiction. (Indeed, it would be interesting to compare the two cosmologies, though it lies beyond the scope of my present project.) What will emerge is that Lewis disagrees not simply on whether the Fall was a fortunate one (I believe he does disagree with Pullman here) or on the necessity of growing up (I believe his view actually has much in common with Pullman's), but on those fundamental assumptions about innocence, sin, and maturity. Following Pullman's lead, my main concern will be with the Narnia series, but elucidating these assumptions will take me into other works, notably Perelandra.

Such prohibitions bind not

Pullman's own assumptions about the nature of sin and its relationship to maturity--the assumptions that largely drive his reading of Susan's exclusion from paradise--are spelled out in some detail in a Wisconsin Public Radio interview. For him, "sin consists largely of curiosity, or curiosity is largely the embodiment of sin"; the first sin, "the initial root of all [other sins, ...] was curiosity. The serpent said, taste this and you'll see what good and evil are like. So [Eve] did, and those things all came out of her initial sin of curiosity. That's where it all began, and that's what the Western Church has been saying for a long time" (Pullman). In other words, the Genesis account reference to the "tree of the knowledge of good and evil" (Gen. 2.17, KJV) means that the tree literally contains, or directly represents, this knowledge, and it was precisely desire for this knowledge that led Eve to transgress.

Moreover, for Pullman, knowledge such as that obtained from the forbidden tree is critical to human development; the inseparability of knowledge and sin, in his reading of Genesis, renders sin an absolute prerequisite for maturity. Though innocence is lost, that loss is a necessary step toward growth: