The Problem of Pain and The Magician’s Nephew:Evil Comes to Narnia at its Awakening

The second essay for Dr. Michael Dauphanias' class, handed in on July 14, 2021.

In The Problem of Pain, Lewis addresses the age-old question: If God is good, why is there evil in the world? While still an atheist, Lewis saw the universe as existing largely of “empty space, completely dark and unimaginably cold.”[1] Further, this universe is a place of pain, pain which exists in the lowest of life forms, and which gets only worse in higher life forms: man “is enabled to foresee his own pain which henceforth is preceded with acute mental suffering, and to foresee his own death while keenly desiring permanence.”[2]

Lewis again addresses this issue in The Magician’s Nephew, where he gives us several main characters through whom we see this issue of pain. Digory is facing the pain of his mother’s illness and expected death. His pain, in one sense, comes from his understanding of the physical pain his mother is in; he shares in her physical pain because of his love for her. His pain is also anticipatory, as he looks ahead to her death and his own impending loss. Uncle Andrew’s pain is of another type altogether; his pain is that of ignorance and selfishness. He and Queen Jadis share the same quality of believing they are above such petty considerations as the rights of others.

We see this quality in Uncle Andrew soon after we meet him, when he tells Digory “Rules … can’t possibly be expected to apply to profound students and great thinkers and sages….Men like me, who possess hidden wisdom, are freed from common rules….”[3] Digory sees through this: “‘All it means,’ he said to himself, ‘Is that he thinks he can do anything he likes to get anything he wants.”[4]

Digory is made of sterner stuff than Uncle Andrew. He knows right from wrong, and wants to do what is right. Once he realizes that Uncle Andrew has sent Polly off to another world with no way of getting back, Digory knows he must go after her to save her: “And he thought then, as he always thought afterwards, too, that he could not decently have done anything else.”[5]

If only Digory had gone to Polly and returned right away, the next evil may have never happened. But Digory, while a better person than Uncle Andrew, has that same curiosity and, perhaps, need, to explore the unknown. In a palace filled with dead, stone figures, he strikes a bell, which awakens the evil Queen Jadis. Digory is quick to understand that Jadis and Uncle Andrew are cut from the same cloth: “You must learn, child, that what would be wrong for you or for any of the common people is not wrong for a great Queen such as I. The weight of the world is on our shoulders. We must be freed from all rules. Ours is a high and lonely destiny.”[6] Digory recognizes these words, as Uncle Andrew had said the same thing earlier, in his own defense. Jadis gives further evidence of her sense of importance. In describing her destruction of her own kingdom and people to defeat her sister, she shows no remorse, only entitlement: “Don’t you understand? … I was the Queen. They were all my people. What else were they there for but to do my will?”[7]

Here, then, is the paradox of free will. As Lewis points out, free will is just that, free; we cannot say “God can give a creature free will and at the same time withhold free will from it.”[8] Jadis withholds free will from her subjects. She states, “my people;” yet her attitude is more correctly “my possessions.”

In trying to escape from Jadis, Digory and Polly inadvertently bring her first to London, where she wreaks havoc, and then, in an attempt to return her to her own world, end up bringing her, Uncle Andrew, a London cabbie, and his horse, from London to a world at the dawn of its creation, the world of Narnia. Thus, evil enters Narnia even before Aslan has awakened it.

We experience, along with Digory and Polly, the awakening of Narnia in The Magician’s Nephew, seeing Aslan awaken the animals, and give certain chosen ones the gift of speech. Uncle Andrew does not get to experience this, because his mind is closed. He cannot understand the animals’ speech; he hears only growling. He doesn’t experience Aslan as a sentient creature, but only as a wild lion pacing back and forth and roaring. His pain, his sin of pride, keeps him deaf and blind. He cannot see or hear God. “But pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pain: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world. A bad man, happy, is a man without the least inkling that his actions do not ‘answer’, that they are not in accord with the laws of the universe.”[9].

Uncle Andrew never accepts responsibility for any of his actions. When Aslan is singing Narnia into life, Uncle Andrew “had disliked the song very much. It made him think and feel things he did not want to think and feel.”[10] One cannot repent if one cannot bear to face their own shortcomings: “And if, now that we are grown up, we do not howl and stamp quite so much, that is partly because our elders began the process of breaking or killing our self-will in the nursery…”[11]

Uncle Andrew and Jadis are both bound up in this seductive power of evil, and thus evil continues to be a problem for Narnia, just as it remains for the world. We will meet Jadis again in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, where we know her as the Queen or the White Witch. She is defeated in that story. Her legend is still known in Prince Caspian, a story which takes place much later in Narnia’s history. With Caspian’s army losing, Nikabrik suggests turning away from good to evil: “We want power: and we want a power that will be on our side. As for power, did not the story say that the witch defeated Aslan, and bound him, and killed him on that very stone which is over there just beyond the light? [The Witch] ruled for a hundred years, a hundred years of winter. There’s power, if you like. There's something practical.”[12]

Jadis never repents of her ways; she cannot repent, for she has left all sense of good and evil behind. She knows no power higher than herself. Nikabrik does not get an opportunity to seek forgiveness; he is killed before he can put his plan in action. His fate shows the finality of his choices: “I willingly believe that the damned are, in one sense, successful, rebels to the end; that the doors of hell are locked on the inside.”[13]

We are told that “in his old age [Uncle Andrew] became a nicer and less selfish old man than he had ever been before,”[14] but he would still tell visitors about “a mysterious lady, a foreign royalty, with whom he had driven about London.”[15] The stories we tell about ourselves may be a form of truth, but we erase our own errors and tell a story where we are only heroes, where we lived as though we never needed repentance. As scripture teaches us, we do know the difference between right and wrong, and we know God’s law: “Christ calls men to repent – a call which would be meaningless if God’s standards were sheerly different from that which they already knew and failed to practise.”[16] We fail, and we seek forgiveness: “The demand that God should forgive such a man while he remains what he is, is based on a confusion between condoning and forgiving. To condone an evil is simply to ignore it, to treat it as if it were good. But forgiveness needs to be accepted as well as offered if it is to be complete: and a man who admits no guilt can accept no forgiveness.”[17]

Pain exists in the world, and God permits it to exist, because we would not be free if we were forced to love and obey God.

[1] C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain, Chapter 1, Introductory, p. 12

[2] C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain, Chapter 1, Introductory, p. 12

[3] C.S. Lewis, The Magician’s Nephew, Chapter 2, p. 23

[4] C.S. Lewis, The Magician’s Nephew, Chapter 2, p. 23-24

[5] C.S. Lewis, The Magician’s Nephew, Chapter 2, p. 30

[6] C.S. Lewis, The Magician’s Nephew, Chapter 5, p. 61

[7] C.S. Lewis, The Magician’s Nephew, Chapter 5, p. 61

[8] C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain, Chapter 2, p. 22

[9] C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain, Chapter 6, p. 63

[10] C.S. Lewis, The Magician’s Nephew, Chapter 10, p 116-117

[11] C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain, Chapter 6, p. 62