To further understand the Christian meaning of Lewis’s garden and the apple tree, we must now turn to the temptation scene of Digory by the Witch (191-195), the only such scene that occurs in a garden setting in the Chronicles. It also presents parallels to Satan’s temptation of Eve in Paradise Lost, with the fruit becoming more central than ever in both works. For in both settings it is the eating (or not eating) of the fruit that matters, an action upon which hangs the destiny of Narnia and the world. Eating the forbidden fruit in Milton’s garden leads to, among many catastrophes, its desecration and the expulsion of its inhabitants; eating of the apple in Lewis’s garden at the wrong time will transform one’s perception of good into evil.
Both the Witch and Satan have already vaulted over the garden walls and entered the private enclosed garden unlawfully. Unlike Satan, the Witch has actually eaten of the fruit, and she proceeds to fill in Digory’s fancy with vain hopes and illusory dreams, much like Satan in tempting Eve, to turn the good into evil in his mind. Cloaking evil with good is Satan’s signature. This action is the essence of fraud, heavily punished in earlier works like Dante’s Inferno and Spenser’s Fairie Queene. The Witch tempts Digory on many levels, playing on false hope, fear, love for mother and friend, and his sense of security. First, like Satan, she appeals to his vanity, describing the apple as “the apple of youth, the apple of life,” without telling him of the disastrous consequences (192). These words echo Satan’s words to Eve: “Ye shall not die. / How should ye? By the fruit? it gives you life / to knowledge” (Milton 9.685-687). The Witch, like Satan again, targets Digory’s loyalty to his master by attempting to convince him of Aslan’s tyranny and his plans to enslave him, thus trying to create a breach between him and Aslan. This is the same trick that Satan plays on his angels, saying, “[i]t is better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven” (1.262). Both suffer from pride and from acedia, the sin of sloth and despair, the results of their unsuccessful quests to defy God and Aslan. Satan and the Witch try to arouse the same despair in their victims, which would then lead them to eat the fruit. When the Witch fails, she changes her strategy by appealing to Digory’s feelings for his mother, urging him to steal the apple to save her. Her “fatal mistake” occurs when she tempts him, in a last desperate effort, to abandon Polly in Narnia so that she would not tell on him. His head clears at this mean and shocking suggestion to break a promise to a friend, and he confronts her with the question, “What’s it got to do with you?” (195). The Witch, defeated, turns and skulks northward, in the evil direction where Satan, too, masses his forces in Paradise Lost.
The temptation by the Witch becomes a rite of passage for Digory, who passes these challenges through his classical virtues of temperance, continence, moral courage, loyalty, and through his Christian virtue of caritas, albeit with some help from Aslan, who earlier gave him a Lion’s kiss to instill “new strength and courage into him” (169). In the quest for the silver apple, Digory finds himself and recognizes his identity as one loyal to Aslan. While Digory is not of the same stature as the biblical or Miltonic Adam[3], Aslan occasionally calls him a “son of Adam,” and his resistance to the Witch demonstrates both his own virtues and his dependence upon Aslan for crucial help. When we next meet Diggory in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, he is a professor in England and has carefully retained his childhood experience of redemption. Through Digory and Aslan, Lewis’s mythopoeic imagination transforms the garden with the apple tree, scorched by Satan, Adam, and Eve, into a shining icon of Christian hope and regeneration. The wall, gates, fruits, and heavenly smell will all re-appear in The Last Battle.
II. The Voyage of the Dawn Treader[4]
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader includes a locus amoenus of the traditional garden. Indeed, it approaches the type of the earthly garden trope by mirroring in itself another garden, the celestial paradise. The landscape of the garden is offered to us first in relation to Eustace’s story and his metamorphosis into a dragon and back to a human. As Eustace narrates, the lion took him to “the top of a mountain I’d never seen before and on the top of this mountain there was a garden-trees and fruit and everything. In the middle of it there was a well” (114). The traditional garden motifs are here: the mountain, trees, fruit, and a well. This place is of great significance to Eustace because he is immersed in that well by Aslan in order to regain his human shape. With careful ministration, the process of Eustace’s regeneration, described through baptismal imagery, is completed: the undressing, the peeling off of Eustace’s dragon skin, the throwing of Eustace into the water, and Aslan’s dressing him in new clothes. As a result, in regaining his humanity through interaction with Aslan, Eustace loses his unbelief, his greed, his sloth, and his hostility to others-even to Reepicheep. He is accepted into the community of the other travelers as a committed member.[5] Lewis is suggesting here his belief in the interdependence of Christians and the importance of fellowship to survive physically and be saved spiritually. The iconic image of Aslan as a persistent Christ figure who enters a human life and transforms a willing soul into participation in such a fellowship is obvious here, as it will be in The Last Battle.[6] For, as Alister McGrath states, “[w]e are not meant to travel alone” (McGrath 27). So Eustace’s garden becomes the Garden of Eden restored. He will forever remember the garden as a place of purification and regeneration through Aslan’s love. However, he does not remember the specific location of this garden or the means of his getting there. It does not conform to laws of space and time like the garden we shall see in The Last Battle; its role is to function as an iconic image that points to Aslan’s Country (the Christian earthly paradise in our world) and to an act of restoration by Aslan which prefigures the apocalypse in The Last Battle, when the Narnians and the British children are spiritually ready. This iconic image does not appear again until the final tableau in the story, where it is linked to other icons in a sublime pageant, a type of communal experience in the Chronicles.