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

Mythlore, Summer, 2003 by Mary R. Bowman

The way I see it is that the loss--and it is a loss--of the innocence and the grace that we are born with, is something that's a necessary stage that we all have to go through, and far from lamenting it, we should welcome it, we should accept it as a necessary stage, and we should then go on to the next part of our development, because human beings in the middle part of their lives, as we are, are on a sort of spectrum, on a sort of ladder if you like, a spectrum that leads from the innocence of childhood, if we are lucky, to, at the other end, wisdom. (Pullman)

Crucial here is the idea that this wisdom cannot be combined with innocence, and could not have been gained without the Fall: "[T]he point is that innocence, we have to leave it behind. Innocence cannot be wise. [...] And furthermore, wisdom cannot be innocent."

In short, thinks Pullman, the Prohibition was specifically a prohibition to know and therefore a prohibition to mature, and its violation was necessary before humanity could explore and develop its full potential. In this sense Pullman regards the Fall as a felix culpa, a "fortunate fall." (Though he uses the term in the WPR interview, he makes it clear that the happiness of the fall lies in the human growth that it enabled; his idea of the felix culpa thus differs from the traditional idea, which emphasizes the miracles that it inspired: the Incarnation and Resurrection.)

Implicit in this interpretation is the additional assumption that the Prohibition was permanent. When Steve Paulson suggests "that if Eve had never taken a bite from the apple, if she had never developed that self-consciousness, that knowingness between good and evil, then we would be nothing today, we would be living in some state of innocence that would be totally dull," Pullman concurs: "That's the clear implication of the story. We would still be pets. We would still be children" (Pullman). Without disobedience, human beings would never have acquired knowledge of good and evil, and thereby wisdom and maturity.

Pullman reads the Prohibition, in fact, much as Milton's Satan does, and as his Eve does after she has begun to accept Satan's arguments. In Paradise Lost, it is Satan who takes the Prohibition to mean that "'Knowledge [is] forbidd'n'" and that it is "'sin to know'" (4.515, 517) and who assumes that the rule prevents development, being "'invented with design / To keep them low whom Knowledge might exalt / Equal with Gods'" (4.524-6). He succeeds in persuading Eve that the injunction is unjust and therefore not to be obeyed: "'what forbids he but to know,'" she concludes moments before taking the fatal bite, "'Forbids us good, forbids us to be wise? / Such prohibitions bind not'" (9.758-60). But Milton himself elsewhere suggests that it is even now possible for "virtue" to "kno[w ...] the utmost that vice promises to her followers, and rejec[t] it," that it is possible to "see and know, and yet abstain" (Areopagitica 728-29).

Lewis, good Miltonist that he was, sees things much more as Milton does. (And he dismisses the Blakean notion that Satan is the true hero of Paradise Lost as "wholly erroneous," Preface 94.) While Pullman's theological views shape his own fiction, and rightly so, any commentary on Lewis's fiction that treats such ideas as a given is highly susceptible to error, for Lewis disagrees with Pullman on these fundamental assumptions. For Lewis, the Prohibition was not about knowledge at all; it was not permanent; far from being a bar to wisdom, it was a vehicle to it; and mature wisdom is absolutely compatible with innocence or would have been in an unfallen world.