Narnia and the Fields of Arbol: The Environmental Vision of C. S. Lewis

8. The Re-enchantment of Creation

But we need not surrender the love of nature . . . to the debunkers . Nature cannot satisfy the desires she arouses nor answer theological questions nor sanctify us. . . . But the love of her has been a valuable and, for some people, an indispensable initiation . —C. S. Lewis, Four Loves Enchantment’s end is the surrender, or submission, of the soul to the beauty of nature and art. Technology’s end is the conquest of nature by power. —Peter Kreeft, The Philosophy of Tolkien In the title of this chapter, we use the word enchantment. We have used the word often throughout this book, but so far haven’t stopped to say exactly what we mean by it. Part of the reason is that it has multiple meanings, and we have made use of more than one. Enchantment may be a subjective feeling. Something—in the context of this book, that “something” is nature, or creation—may make us feel enchanted. In an essay with the curious title“Talking about Bicycles,” Lewis describes this sort of enchantment by means of explaining the way one might feel about (for example) bicycling. The essay takes the form of a (possibly fictional) dialogue with an unnamed friend, in which Lewis plays something of a cynical oaf. The friend describes four possible stages (or ages) in one’s lifetime relationship with bicycles: the Unenchanted Age, the Enchanted Age, the Disenchanted Age, and the Re-enchanted Age. In the first, one has simply never experienced The Re-enchantment of Creation Chapter 8  241 242 Narnia and the Fields of Arbol bicycles—that is, really experienced them by riding one. In the second, one is entirely enamored by them, with a sort of romantic splendor, “when to have a bicycle, and to have learned to ride it, and to be at last spinning along on one’s own, early in the morning, under trees, in and out of the shadows, was like entering Paradise.” In the third stage, the Disenchanted Age, the romantic feelings are gone; if one has only a bicycle, and must rely upon it for one’s livelihood or for a daily commute , it can become sheer drudgery “pedaling to and fro from school . . . in all weathers” (TaB, 67). The promises that it was a gateway to paradise have proven false, and one knows it. The fourth stage, the Re-enchanted Age, is the interesting one. It does not deny the reality of the drudgery, nor does it deny that the romantic feelings are often misleading illusions. It acknowledges both. But it also realizes that there was something true in that romance as well. As the friend describes in the dialogue, I recover [in the fourth age] the feelings of the second age. What’s more, I see how true they were—how philosophical, even. For it really is a remarkably pleasant motion. To be sure, it is not a recipe for happiness as I then thought. In that sense the second age was a mirage. But a mirage of something. . . . Whether there is, or whether there is not, in this world or in any other, the kind of happiness which one’s first experience of cycling seems to promise, still, on any view, it is something to have had the idea of it. The value of the thing promised remains even if that particular promise was false—even if all possible promises of it are false. (TaB, 67–68) Bicycles, of course, are merely the image used to make a point. These four stages find relevance with many things. As the friend suggests, relationships in general and marriages in particular are areas of life to which this analysis may apply. A honeymoon is perhaps the supreme example of the Enchanted Age, when the married couple is quite sure that marriage will not only be a recipe for happiness, but will be nothing other than happiness and paradise. Most couples then enter a Disenchanted Age when the flaws of the new partner are exposed. That is when we say “the honeymoon is over”—an expression that has become an idiom for what Lewis would call the Disenchanted Age. Some marriages emerge The Re-enchantment of Creation 243 into the Fourth Age. Some do not. In the Fourth Age, one can look at one’s partner, see the faults, and know that the marriage takes hard work, but still enjoy the feelings brought on by...