The summer view out my front window rewards me with glimpses of the season’s beauty. The rose blooms sway in the gentle breeze. The bottlebrush trees that stand on either side of the fence—one, ours, the other, our neighbours—raise their branches, green leaves highlighted with pink, to bask in the afternoon sunlight. The bird of paradise flower shows off its brilliant orange and blue blooms. These delights are only a small piece of the beauty of the world, paling in comparison to sweeping vistas of oceans and mountains just a short drive away from my home.
While this observation of the world’s beauty is not, to most, contestable, the question of our relationship to the world is much more fraught. Throughout Christian tradition, theologians have tried to walk the tightrope that is the recognition of the goodness of creation along with its impermanence and subordination. Affirming God’s creation declaration of ‘very good,’ Christian doctrine nevertheless also recognises the transience that is part of the natural world. As something created, nature is contingent—not God, but dependent on God for its existence. And on this side of the curse, idolatry afflicts us, turning our hearts from the Creator to created things, enticed by their physical beauty. Given this significant risk, many Christians throughout the tradition have thought it better to renounce the love of visible things, counting them, despite their obvious beauty, as so much as decaying rubbish to be shaken off. A less severe response has been simple indifference, as the beauty of creation is deemed insignificant in light of that spiritual beauty which is not transient.
A different response comes from C.S. Lewis. Best known for his children’s series The Chronicles of Narnia, Lewis also explored a variety of theological ideas in his non-fiction. In his writings, he attributed his very understanding of God’s love to his experience of nature’s beauty—without denying nature’s subordination. Glimpsed first in a toy garden that his brother had composed of moss, twigs, and flowers in a small biscuit tin, and daily in the hills visible from his childhood home, beauty, Lewis claims, taught him longing. In his exploration of the love of nature in The Four Loves, Lewis writes that ‘nature gave the word glory a meaning for me.’
And yet, Lewis is clear in The Four Loves to communicate the limitations of nature. He seems to contradict his earlier claim about nature’s ability when he says ‘nature does not teach.’ By this he means that nature cannot give us anything new, but rather, can only show us what our theology or metaphysics means. Nature is an image of glory, and not glory itself. And so, he argues, ‘We must make a detour—leave the hills and woods and go back to our studies, to church, to our Bibles, to our knees… Our real journey to God involves constantly turning our backs on [nature]; passing from the dawn-lit fields into some poky little church or (it might be) going to work in an East End parish. But the love of her has been a valuable and, for some people, an indispensable initiation.’
With such an argument, it might be easy to conclude that Lewis, like many others, shrugs his shoulders at creation as a nice ornament, but not worth our time in light of spiritual beauty in light of God Himself. Yet, throughout The Four Loves, Lewis repeats a quote from Thomas à Kempis, ‘the highest cannot stand without the lowest.’ In its original context, this phrase is used to exhort the reader to humility. However, Lewis seems to use it a bit differently in his argument: throughout The Four Loves it appears as a caution to the reader. Lewis warns us not to disdain those forms of love which need something in favour of love which gives or appreciates. Even though the latter may seem superior, Lewis argues that our creaturely dependence and neediness is a good thing. Despising the ‘lowest,’ then, is more a sign of spiritual sickness than a triumph of the spiritual over the physical.
Love, in Lewis’ argument, can lead us to God. At its best, love points the way to divine love. Here, we can see a connection to that ancient image of Plato’s: the ladder. In Plato’s Symposium, he describes the apprehension of beauty as a gradual ascent from the sensible world of physical, bodily beauty (which is necessarily partly ugly and corruptible) to ‘absolute’ beauty—a divine beauty that is not mere reflection, or mortal, but eternal beauty itself. In this ladder analogy, beauty in the sensible world functions as the lowest steps on a ladder which leads to absolute beauty.
Lewis leaves Plato, however, in what follows after the ladder has been ascended. In Plato’s analogy, the lower rungs (of physical beauty) are left behind after one attains to the goal. They are no longer necessary, for why would someone choose to continue to enjoy ‘a beauty tainted by human flesh and color and a mass of perishable rubbish’ when she is able to ‘apprehend divine beauty where it exists apart and alone’? However, Lewis’ refrain ‘the highest cannot stand without the lowest’ resists this kind of conclusion. The lowest rungs do not cease to be important simply because we’ve ascended to our goal—‘we do not disparage silver by distinguishing it from gold.’
As is typical across Lewis’ corpus, the argument in his non-fiction is illustrated in his fiction. In The Silver Chair, Lewis gives us a picture of this relationship to the created world. The heroes of the story, two children and a marshwiggle, are tasked with a quest for a lost prince. At the climax of the story, the heroes face the enchantment of the Green Witch—the woman who has imprisoned the missing prince. The scene of their resistance is Underland, an underground kingdom ruled by the Green Witch. Trying to enchant them, and so continue her enchantment of the prince and Underland, the Green Witch tries to convince them that there is no Narnia—there is no land other than Underland.
The witch presses them to explain what they mean by sky, sun, and stars, using her green powder to confuse their minds so that they will forget where they came from. Her arguments seek to cut off what they can see in Underland—the lamp, a cat—from the higher world of Narnia, with its sun and the lion, Aslan.
This strategy, in Plato’s analogy of the ladder, cuts off the lower rungs from the higher rungs—or, in Lewis’ borrowed refrain, the highest from the lowest. The Green Witch insists that there is no higher reality that the lower things lead us to. The drama of this scene in The Silver Chair is whether or not the heroes will succumb to the witch’s spell, and to her refusal to cede authority to Aslan and Narnia. The consequences of their enchantment would lead to the loss of Narnia—but that’s not all that they would lose. Failure to defeat the Green Witch would also mean that Underland, including the subjugated Earthmen, would continue to suffer under her rule. By defeating the witch, they receive both Narnia and Underland. Underland is not destroyed, but redeemed. This point is illustrated by the book’s conclusion. The final sentences describe Underland in the time after the witch’s defeat:
‘The opening into the hillside was left open, and often in hot summer days the Narnians go in there with ships and lanterns and down to the water and sail to and fro, singing, on the cool, dark underground sea, telling each other stories of the cities that lie fathoms deep below. If you ever have the luck to go to Narnia yourself, do not forget to have a look at those caves.’
Michael Ward, a Lewis scholar, observes that now that Underland has been purged of the witch’s spell, it is a good place. It brings pleasure to the Narnians in the summertime, and it is worth a visit for travelers.
How, then, does all of this connect to the idea of creation’s beauty? Here in Lewis’ fiction and non-fiction is a double movement: we ascend up, by way of creation, to divine beauty. The physical, material beauty that we sense here on earth is a means of drawing us up to what is permanent and unchanging. And then, by virtue of having prioritised divine beauty, we do not leave created beauty behind. Instead, we receive it back. We can descend the ladder, not in rejection of divine beauty, but as a joyful receiving of creation. This receiving is made possible by our putting creation in its rightful place. It is good, it can dazzle us, making us catch our breath in wonder and awe. But it is not ultimate.
And yet, when we properly order created beauty under divine beauty, we get both. We can only perceive created beauty rightly when we have perceived divine beauty: divine beauty is the sun, to use Lewis’ analogy, by which we see the world.
As creatures, dependent on divine love and sustenance, we ought not to yearn to escape the world that has been gifted to us. We must, of course, pursue the truth in order to discern the enchantment of death and corruption that has been cast over our world and seek to break its spell. But we do so to reclaim it. The beauty we perceive in creation calls us to this work. Led to a deeper beauty from the beauty that shines through creation, we can then move back towards the world, embracing it and declaring its redemption.
A version of this piece was originally published in Mathilde Magazine Spring/Summer 2022-2023