C.S. Lewis's theology of animals

Anglican Theological Review, Winter 1998 by Linzey, Andrew

Problems

I now turn to consider some of the difficulties with Lewis's theology of animals. The first concerns Satan and creaturely corruption. One of the reasons why Lewis's speculations have been widely dismissed among academic theologians is his insistence on the reality of Satan or the devil. We know the dilemma only too well: if Satan is not a created being, then we have two gods, and if Satan is a created being who made him-or her? Indeed Joad understandably, if mischievously, characterises Lewis's view of creaturely corruption as `Satan tempting monkeys'.21 The problem is perhaps more fairly stated by William Temple, himself a believer in Satan: `Shelve the responsibility . . . on to Satan if you will. . We still have to ask, Why is the Devil wicked?'22

In fact, Lewis comes to his view about Satan not only because it has some scriptural justification23 but chiefly because of his love of stories or myths: `If it offends less, you may say that the "life-force" is corrupted, where I say that living beings were corrupted by an evil angelic being. We mean the same thing: but I find it easier to believe in a myth of gods and demons than in one of the hypostatised abstract nouns. And, after all, our mythology may be nearer to the literal truth than we suppose.'24 Even if we maintain a modern agnosticism about supernatural evil (an agnosticism I do not fully share25), it is difficult to dispute Lewis's underlying moral conviction that the `intrinsic evil of the world lies in the fact that animals, or some animals, live by destroying each other.'26

For many who have abandoned, or who no longer feel sure in the worldview of limited dualism, Lewis's views will appear archaic, even medieval-a description which he would surely have relished. But the myth of Satan has enduring theological and ethical significance. If we close our minds to this imaginative possibility, we may be led to one indubitably worse, and sadly it is one exhibited by more and more 'natural' or 'ecological' theologians. It is that God really did make the world as it is with all its attendant predation, futility, cruelty, and waste and that consequently we ought morally to resign ourselves to it. This is what I have described elsewhere as the `Anti-Gospel of Jesus our Predator'.27 Either predation is or is not God's will. If it is, not only does God become less praiseworthy and less good, but, as Lewis acknowledges, dire consequences also flow for humans from this perceived lack of divine magnanimity.28 It may be that without something like a limited cosmological dualism, it is impossible even to recognize it.

To give one recent example: Brian Home, in an otherwise sagacious and perceptive discussion, concludes that the discoveries of natural science force upon us a reconsideration of the nature of evil. `Modern zoology leads us to suppose that death and sickness, earthquakes and floods, have always been part of the structure of the planet . . .'. He continues that such a perspective `require(s) us to view pain and death not as evil and outrageous, arising out of some act in the distant past, but as plain and inescapable facts of biological existence. Physical and moral evil become separated.'29 The result is frighteningly reductionistic: we should learn to regard these `occasions' in both the human and animal sphere as `occasions for love', so that the worst that evil could do to such love `would be to provide it with fresh opportunities for loving'.30