How should Christians think about intelligent design?  What of its conclusion-that evolutionary theory is wrong?  Is mainstream science too restrictive in insisting on naturalistic explanations for observed phenomena?  Because the intelligent design movement began almost 30 years after Christian writer C. S. Lewis’s death, we cannot definitively say what he would have thought about it.  Lewis did, however, write frequently about the nature of science, including evolution.  His views on this topic have been appreciated by believers and unbelievers alike.  I will suggest that Lewis would have rejected intelligent design for two reasons:  (1) its practitioners fail to recognize the established limitations of inferential science, which Lewis frequently defended, and (2) intelligent design exchanges the glory of the Christian God-which believers see so clearly in nature-for evidence of a potential but unknowable Intelligence.

In the past 150 years since Darwin first announced his theory of evolution by natural selection, the human body has become increasingly de-spiritualized.  This de-spiritualization is not only the result of evolutionary theory, but of all modern biology which seeks to uncover the structure and inner workings of our physical bodies.  The fact that, at basest level, our genes are essentially interchangeable with those of bacteria seems to reduce the Imago Dei to a groundless myth in the eyes of modern materialists.  Christians too often accept this logic and either reject the Bible or retreat to antiscience.

Lewis, in contrast, had a different response.  He felt that scientific explanations were descriptive but not meaningful in the ultimate sense; that is, a thing is more than the stuff it is made of-it may have tremendous symbolic or spiritual significance  (Ward 2008).  If we are to reflect truly the image of God, we must remember that human beings are more than the molecules that comprise our bodies.  Even as we rationally observe our genetic continuity with other forms of life, we have good reason to believe that we are indeed a special creation, set apart from the animals by our unique ability to willfully glorify and enjoy God.

Lewis on the nature of science

Though Lewis was not a scientist, he knew much about the philosophy of science.  Frequently, he wrote about the distinction between science and scientism, the latter being the belief that the methods of the natural sciences should be applied to all disciplines, including philosophy, the humanities, and the social sciences (Schaefer 1).  Lewis was decidedly for science and against scientism.  In Mere Christianity, he unpacked the ways in which we can answer the question of whether or not there is a “power” behind the universe.  He wrote, “[s]ince that power, if it exists, would be not one of the observed facts but a reality which makes them, no mere observation of the facts can find it”  (Mere 24).  Lewis believed that the natural sciences, based on empirical observation and inference, can answer certain kinds of questions but not others.

Lewis also thought there was good evidence for rejecting metaphysical naturalism-the belief that nature is all that there is.  In The Weight of Glory, he wrote, “[i]f minds are wholly dependent on brains, and brains on biochemistry, and biochemistry (in the long run) on the meaningless flux of the atoms, I cannot understand how the thought of those minds should have any more significance than the sound of the wind in the trees”  (”Weight” 230).  The existence of reason itself argues for a transcendent Mind.

Ah, the riddle of beauty and the craft of these writers in phrasing that riddle. Indeed, our prince in The Idiot is asked, immediately after his triumphal statement about beauty, just which beauty will save the world? That is a much harder question, but the Prince affirms in response who will save the world. In considering “the Good, the True, and the Beautiful”-our 2005 conference’s title-a temptation arises to forget the Person in view of the principles. Abstract ideas, concepts, and theories can take the place of God who quite physically incarnates those principles. “Beauty is the splendor of truth,” (veritatis splendor) announces Plato, and he has the Forms in mind here, literally Ideas. As compelling as Plato’s picture is of Beauty and Truth being like two slopes to a mountain, this is far different in nature from a God-Man who also announces, “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life”.[5] The latter statement makes the transcendent incarnate. Again, if Beauty will save the world, in Dostoevsky’s view, it will be a person.

Moreover, every man and every woman strongly desires this beauty, mediated (as Gerard Manley Hopkins would put it) in ten thousand places. C. S. Lewis is no exception. The appetite for beauty comes inscribed into every soul and it is a very large appetite. “By nature men desire the beautiful,” says St. Basil the Great (circa 379 A.D.)-and I might stress that they desire it immensely.[6] One knows already about the thousands of books Lewis owned by the end of his life, many thousands in fact-books that held up the walls of The Kilns. But why he owned so many is a theological question. Why did he want so many? What archetypal story did he want to read? What was he searching for when he lovingly described the binding size and price of a new book to Arthur Greeves during their teenage pilgrimage? And once owned, why re-read them so assiduously (The Iliad up to 10 times)? Plato himself describes the phenomenon in a famous section of his Symposium.[7] Men, Plato writes, have a thirst or an eros for the beautiful, and there are lesser satisfactions: endless beautiful bodies if one is a decadent Athenian, endless new ideas (analytic or imaginative) if one is a bookish Athenian, or endless C. S. Lewis conferences if one is an Anglo-philiac Athenian.

Appetites, however, want substance, and thus we come to the main course of this paper. The appetite for beauty is potentially misleading. Whether it is the character John in The Pilgrim’s Regress finding false joy in multiple brown girls or the millionaire finding transient beauty in his third car (or wife!), how can one see what kind of beauty satisfies? Which beauty will save the world? It was a dilemma of which Lewis was keenly aware. In one instance, he particularly admires J.R.R. Tolkien’s assertion in “On Fairy Stories” that “evil and ugliness seem indissolubly allied. We find it difficult to conceive of evil and beauty together. The fear of the beautiful [faerie] that ran through the elder ages almost eludes our grasp”.[8] Yet beautiful deceptions run throughout Lewis’s own storytelling. Thus one meets the indomitably beautiful Queen Jadis in Narnia; Edmund Pevensie was not an entire fool, for the queen is “a great lady, taller than any woman that Edmund had ever seen. She also was covered in white fur up to her throat and held a long straight golden wand in her right hand. Her face was white-not merely pale, but white like snow or paper or icing sugar, except for her very red mouth. It was a beautiful face”.[9] Evil and beautiful are here linked: and thus the directors have chosen Nicole Kidman to play the Queen in the coming film.

If you asked twenty good men today what they thought the highest of the virtues, nineteen of them would reply, Unselfishness.  But if you had asked almost any of the great Christians of old, he would have replied, Love.  You see what has happened?  A negative term has been substituted for a positive, and this is of more than philological importance.  The negative idea of Unselfishness carries with it the suggestion not primarily of securing good things for others, but of going without them ourselves, as if our abstinence and not their happiness was the important point.  I do not thik this is the Christian virtue of Love.  The New Testament has lots to say about self-denial, but not about self-denial as an end in itself.  We are told to deny ourselves and to take up our crosses in order that we may follow Christ; and nearly every description of what we shall ultimately find if we do so contains an appeal to desire.  If there lurks in most modern minds the notion that to desire our own good and earnestly to hope for the enjoyment of it is a bad thing, I submit that this notion has crept in from Kant and the Stoics and is no part of the Christian faith.  Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak.  We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by an offer of a holiday at the sea.  We are far too easily pleased.[1]

Although Lewis’s subject in this sermon concerns Christian discipleship more generally, he begins with a point about ethics.  With characteristic awareness, Lewis knows that the legitimacy of being motivated by the promise of Heaven’s rewards will at first appear to be morally out of bounds for the Christian.  The view in most “modern minds” of Christian ethics, and of Christian discipleship more generally, is that doing the right thing is most essentially a matter of self-denial, sacrifice, and “disinterested” fulfillment of obligation.  Any positive relation that morality has to our own happiness or well-being-any essential connection between “doing good” and “my good”-is ruled out.  Put differently, the “pursuit of happiness,” for us, is not a specifically moral pursuit.  At best it is nonmoral, a matter of prudential self-interest:  something in which we should perhaps be legally free to engage, in view of the Declaration of Independence, but only as long as our pursuit stays within the bounds of moral obligation.  All too often, the pursuit of happiness represents to us something actually immoral:  “because I want to be happy” is probably the most common reason we hear-or give-for justifying morally wrong behavior.  This way of thinking about ethics, especially Christian ethics, has attained an almost self-evident status among Christians and critics of Christianity (e.g. Friedrich Nietzsche and Ayn Rand) alike.

But Lewis disagrees, as does the weight of ancient and medieval thought, both pagan and Christian, up until the late Middle Ages.  Classical thinkers viewed happiness as intrinsically connected to ethics; indeed, they considered happiness to be the starting point of all moral thought.  Moral action, in their view, is grounded rationally and normatively in the pursuit of happiness.  These thinkers were, in other words, “ethical eudaimonists”:  they understood moral action to be grounded in the pursuit of eudaimonia (Greek: well-being or flourishing - traditionally translated as “happiness”).

C. S. Lewis, like the classical tradition in which he was trained, is a eudaimonist.  To demonstrate this, and to show how he answers Christian-inspired objections to this view, are tasks I take up elsewhere.[2] In the present paper I merely aim to give a brief introduction to eudaimonism and its pedigree, and to point in the direction of its virtues.  As indicated, eudaimonism comes from the Greek word, ‘eudaimonia‘, which is typically translated as “happiness.”  These days, however, our English word “happiness” usually refers to a feeling or subjective state of pleasure, satisfaction, contentment, or enjoyment-a largely subjective, superficial, and luck-dependent matter.  But classical thinkers seldom, if ever, conceived of eudaimonia in that way.  Instead, they identified it with the summum bonum, the supreme or highest good, the objectively good life for humans.

To understand this adequately, it is important to see that the central questions in classical ethics were teleological-that is, about aims or goals (telos is the Greek word for “end” or “aim”).  Classical thinkers such as Aristotle thought of all distinctively human or rational action as end-directed.  An intentional action, that which comes within the purview of moral evaluation, is an action that is done for a reason, performed for the sake of an end, for the sake of realizing some good-i.e. something the agent takes to be good or worth seeking.  The end for which an action is performed may be sought or desired for its own sake, or for the sake of yet another end, or both for its own sake and for the sake of a further end.  Ultimately, however, an individual’s actions are to be rationally and motivationally grounded in a final or ultimate end that she seeks solely for its own sake.  Such an end will represent her integrative vision of the good life, what she takes to be the highest good worth living for, that for the sake of which she seeks everything that she seeks.

A garden enclosed is my sister my spouse;
a spring shut up, a fountain sealed.
-Canticles 4:12

I.  Introduction

To Christian writers, landscape and its seasons are not merely backdrops for plots and characters.  As places of destination they are integral elements of quest narratives or pilgrimages.  More importantly, nature’s cyclical patterns often function as maps of the human soul:   “[t]o the Christian, the seasons’ round, often represented by a contrast between spring garden and winter wilderness, is a natural figure of man’s spiritual life” (Stewart 105).  This correspondence between microcosm and macrocosm is a classical belief that pervaded Christian literature in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.  One specific structure of landscape that has been widely used by Christian writers to narrate the cycle of Christian history, from paradise to wilderness and back to paradise, is the enclosed garden (hortus conclusus). The enclosed garden was such a common trope in medieval and Renaissance art that “scarcely an event from the life of Christ exists for which some artist at some time or other has not provided a backdrop of an unfinished enclosure [....] The touchstone of the enclosed garden [was] an emblem (hortus mentis) of man’s inner being.  This is how the figure was used by St. Teresa and St. John, and how it was used by Herbert, Vaughan, and Marvell” (Stewart 47, 169).  As J.T. Rhodes and Clifford Davidson also affirm, “[t]he beginning and end of time were marked by the garden”  (95).

A. Bartlett’s The Earthly Paradise and the Renaissance Epic is of great help in interpreting these gardens and their motifs.  Giamatti defines the Garden of Eden as “a place of perfect repose and harmony” (11) which exists “in some normally inaccessible part of the earth, which might become the goal of man’s search and, in a literal as well as metaphorical way, the object of his dreams” (15).  The traditional motifs of this garden in its ideal form are trees, fruits, green hills, sweet odors and a well or fountain. It is also usually located on a mountain, “a befitting spot of worship” (Porteus 45).  Moreover, as Stewart writes, “[n]ight cannot fall in the enclosed garden because the sun, who is the Son, has eternally risen”  (110).  However, this garden can also be a garden of loss, a type of Gethsemane, a moment of temptation or a place where temptation is actualized as in the biblical Garden of Eden, a place where the self folds back, serpentine, on its own image (Gillespie 314).  A serpent, dragon, or worm (or witch or ape in Lewis’s Chronicles) is sometimes lurking in this garden.  As a place of actualized temptation, it becomes a non-garden-a wilderness, exposed to spiritual and physical onslaughts, a dry land, a wild wood, a thick forest, harboring dragons and serpents in its midst, and also, in the case of Lewis, a courtyard of petrified animals, or a field of snow-all metaphors of exile and isolation in various forms:  doubt, rebellion, restlessness, failure, and fear (McGrath 24 and passim).

Building on Genesis 2:8-10, as well as the images of the vineyard in Isaiah 5 and John 15, biblical exegetes saw the vineyards as “lands enclosed from the open wilderness by the art of man’s husbandry” (Stewart 53).  To Isaiah, the vineyard is Jerusalem, the Lord’s garden built on a fruitful hill and surrounded by a fence (Isaiah 5:1-2), the City of God.  Early medieval and Christian commentators went on to view the vineyard as a metaphor of the church, a divine enclosure with God/Christ as gardeners, set off from the rest of the world through God’s mercy.  On the individual level, the garden is the soul; the wilderness is the corrupted flesh.  Man acting in cooperation with God/Christ will attain a place in the celestial garden.  Thus the “wild is separated from the regenerate” (Stewart 54).

In describing his various gardens in the Chronicles of Narnia, C.S. Lewis draws heavily upon these traditional motifs of gardens in biblical, classical, and early Christian literature.[1] Before writing the Chronicles, he had explored in depth this long tradition of garden poetry in The Allegory of Love (1936).[2] In his discussion of the Roman de la Rose, the most famous and influential of all medieval garden poems, Lewis compares Claudian’s garden of the Hesperides, “the land of longing, the Earthly Paradise, the garden east of the sun and west of the moon” (75-76), to the Good Shepherd’s pasture which is the true garden, the celestial paradise.  He writes, “[w]hen we have seen the true garden we look back and realize that the garden of courtly love is an impostor” (151).  Lewis’s belief in an absolute truth will resurface in his fiction, in the description of the garden in The Last Battle and at other points throughout his Narnian retelling of Christian temptation and redemption. A close reading of the Chronicles, in canonical order, reveals that these multiple levels of meaning regarding the garden imagery operate to some degree in the three types of gardens that are vital to Lewis’s overarching narrative:  1) the garden created (a type of the biblical Garden of Eden) in The Magician’s Nephew which focuses on the inward struggle of the soul in the context of temptation;  2) the garden restored (a type of terrestrial paradise) in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader which focuses on the trials of the fallen soul and its restoration into a community that experiences rest and refreshment of the spirit (the church by analogy); and 3) the garden eternal (a type of a celestial paradise) in The Last Battle, the locus of full perfection, open to all of Aslan’s followers and analogous to the Christian heaven.

Many of us can relate to Barfield’s frustration; in our often hectic and information-clogged lives, it’s all too easy to feel fragmented, frazzled, and fruitless. We have to wear too many hats, take on too many tasks, and wonder wearily when we’ll find that creative spark again. In his gentle and often playful way, Owen Barfield opens for us the door to blossoming, fruitful creativity and to personal wholeness. We read the poems and smile at our former dreams of grandeur, or gaze wistfully into our heart’s delight and promise, as Barfield does. We read This Ever Diverse Pair and bemoan the fragmentation that divides us from our best selves. However, Barfield’s work propels us, as it did him, to a vision of springtime redemption engendered by the Imagination.

Barfield began publishing during the heyday of Modernism, with its ironic, sometimes despair-driven mode of consciousness and expression. His short story, “Dope” (1923), indicates that he might have taken his place in modern letters with others like T. S. Eliot and W. B. Yeats. Thomas Kranidas notes that “Dope” was a “well-written, ironic tale of a young factory-worker whose dreary life is empty of all spiritual reality” (23).  However, Barfield refused to identify with the merely ironic; Kranidas includes an excerpt from a Barfield letter to Eliot: “I am a little tired of literature which can do nothing but point out ironically that there is nothing much going on but disintegration and decay” (23).  Barfield, says Kranidas, “determines to abandon neutrality toward the spiritual desiccation of his times and toward the reigning styles that portrayed that desiccation” (24).  Instead Barfield chose to look at the whole picture, at a world full of polarities but grounded in love and imagination, and full of possibilities.

The quotation in my title is taken from one of Barfield’s poems, “La Dame a Licorne.”

All the world’s depth and width around her grace
Are shadows-Oh the utmost ends of space
Run inward to her, like her unicorn,
Seeking to sink in her, to be unborn,
Be time’s intensity in space’s dearth,
All generations’ appetite to birth
Caught in one miracle of personhood.
And since it doth inhabit (this great good
Clothed with the Sun his plenitude of power)
My very heart, imagination’s Earth,
How shall my spring not blossom into flower?

(Hunter 24)

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