Jamin Bradley

“My earlier experiments were all failures. I tried them on guinea-pigs. Some of them only died. Some exploded like little bombs.”
-Uncle Andrew

C.S. Lewis attempted to capture his disdain for the mistreatment of animals in the character of Uncle Andrew in The Chronicles of Narnia. From an earthly perspective, the man was a scientist who was engaging the invisible world with dark experiments on live animals to gain knowledge and power. From a Narnian perspective, the man was a magician who was doing the same.

In this sense, Lewis almost seemed to overlap the occult with science—not because he was opposed to science! Far from it. Rather, he was opposed to the dark methods we sometimes embrace in order to understand the world around us. As he writes elsewhere,

The victory of vivisection marks a great advance in the triumph of ruthless, non-moral utilitarianism over the old world of ethical law; a triumph in which we, as well as animals, are already the victims, and of which Dachau and Hiroshima mark the more recent achievements. In justifying cruelty to animals we put ourselves also on the animal level. (Vivsection Essay, 1947)

Lewis had already seen how dark scientific experiments could get, for he lived in a time where Nazis were doing horrific experiments on living people against their will. In such moments, the line of study changes from science to occult. If we’re willing to perform demonic methods (stealing, killing, and destroying) to gain knowledge and power, then we are mixing the streams of study.

Humans have been given dominion and authority over the earth and its creatures so that we might care for it and cultivate it into the fullness of what a loving God desires it to be. We were designed by God to be environmentalists and animal lovers. We were not given dominion and authority to abuse creation and do whatever we want with it, as we so often do.

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Go deeper in the concept of caring for creation in Sandra Richter’s insightful Seminary Now course, or her book, Stewards of Eden.