Tool Alpha
C. S. Lewis’s Cosmology
Where Lewis’s heavens follow Scripture, where they come from the medieval picture of the cosmos, and where he made them up.
The fall as a Socratic myth
In The Problem of Pain Lewis offers a picture of the fall: an animal form perfected over ages, then made man. His word for it is a myth in the Socratic sense.
Genesis 3:1-7, in every translation this tool compares.
The real question: what did Lewis himself think happened in Genesis 3? A likely story. Lewis did not claim to know. He offered a picture he thought could be true and said that was all it was. Where it sits against other readings of Genesis is in the boxes below.
Lewis says we do not know exactly what happened when man fell, and offers a picture, "a 'myth' in the Socratic sense, a not unlikely tale": for long centuries God perfected the animal form that would become the vehicle of humanity and his image, which may have existed for ages in that state before it became man. He also says the gravitation away from God must be a product of the Fall.
Genesis 2-3 tells of the first humans formed from the ground, placed in the garden, and disobeying. Romans 5 treats the entry of sin through one man as real.
Lewis's own. A Socratic myth is Plato's term for a likely account offered where certainty is not available.
Lewis's long period of an animal form before it became man is not in Genesis, and it is a mechanism: a body developed over ages and then made human. That puts it nearer the accounts John Lennox argues against, such as Denis Alexander's model of Adam and Eve chosen from an existing population, than nearer Walton. Walton's point is that the forming of Adam in Genesis 2 is archetypal and does not describe a mechanism at all, so Lewis's picture does not sit with him either. Lennox and Walton both stand with Lewis on a real fall: Walton holds that Paul's argument needs a historical moment when sin entered the world.
Not a denial of the fall. Lewis is explicit that something happened and that our nature is the result.
- Lewis, The Problem of Pain (1940), ch. 5
- Lennox, Seven Days that Divide the World (2021), ch. 4
- John H. Walton, The Lost World of Adam and Eve (IVP Academic, 2015), propositions 8 and 11
