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Joseph Weigel

Abstract

In the third and final chapter of The Abolition of Man, C. S. Lewis makes what may be one of the most provocative statements in his entire corpus of writings: “The serious magical endeavour and the serious scientific endeavor are twins. . . . They were born of the same impulse.”1 This claim is jarring because science and magic are thought of as opposites. One seeks knowledge through observation, the other deals in spells, rites, and incantations. However, Lewis recognized something deeper that united the two disciplines. The impulse for “magic and applied science alike,” he continued in Abolition, “is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men.”2 If magic can do the trick, so be it. If applied science proves up to the task, very well. It is merely a matter of technique. According to the renowned Lewis scholar Michael Ward, Lewis’s comments about magic and science from Abolition are never fleshed out in his writings. “Although Lewis nowhere develops this line of thought in considered detail,” writes Michael Ward in Planet Narnia, “it evidently drummed a beat in the background of his mind as he pondered the progress of the scientific enterprise from the sixteenth century up to the modern day.”3 Ward expands on this by noting Lewis’s essay “The World’s Last Night,” in which Lewis suspects that the myth of Progress leads one back through the German Idealists until arriving at the alchemist Jacob Boehme. “Is the whole dialectical view of history possibly a gigantic projection of the old dream that we can make gold?”4 Ward’s assessment that Lewis did not develop this line of thought in considerable detail is correct, at least in part. There is no academic book of Lewis’s dedicated to the sole topic of magic and science.5 However, expanding the net to his works of fiction reveals the magic/science theme developed in a deep and sophisticated fashion. Perhaps there is a reason for this.

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