Book Review: And It Was Good

Title: And It Was Good

Author: Madeleine L’Engle

Publisher: Shaw

Date: 1983

ISBN: 0-87788-046-8

Length: 21 pages

Quote: “It has long struck me with joy and awe that the theory of evolution is not contrary to the teaching of the Bible.”

Like many people my age I discovered A Wrinkle in Time in the school library in grade six, where I recognized it as science fiction. I liked it enough to read the other books beside it on the shelf, also genre fiction. When I found The Moon by Night I was surprised; not because the story turned the usual conventions of teen romance stories upside down, which I liked, but because the heroine was meditating on a Psalm before, during, and after the romance. Could someone who wrote genre fiction be a Christian?

Well, actually, yes. As explained in the nonfiction books she was able to publish only after building a reputation for writing excellent genre fiction, L’Engle was a very active, even orthodox, member of the Episcopalian church. On some points that church’s doctrines were more liberal than those of some other Protestant churches. The competing substitute-for-religion of evolutionism was very noisy and dogmatic at the time, and had apparently bullied many Episcopalians into accepting faith in the dogma of macroevolution, as preached by the prophet Darwin, as objective, scientific fact. They had discovered that they didn’t have to reject the book of Genesis in order to accept the alternative origin myth. The book of Genesis is a collection of poems and legends about a time long ago. It could be “poetic truth,” a metaphor…

As a doctrine to take seriously and teach, that one never satisfied me either. Why, I wondered, is it so difficult for some people to accept the objective scientific facts about the origins of life? We. Do. Not. Know. There is no empirically verifiable way of “scientifically studying” any of the various origin stories floating about. “The fossil record” seems to tell a nice clear story, supported by carbon dating, of “simpler” lifeforms being displaced by “more complex” lifeforms, until you realize that it was put together for that purpose. Microevolution, the rule that natural or human-guided selection will cause a population to evolve toward one or another extreme of what is possible within their species, is a scientific fact students can verify. Macroevolution, the idea that one species can evolve into another species, is a theory that many people treat as a religious doctrine; it can’t be scientifically verified. Like the Anglo-Israelite Theory of more recent prehistory, it’s logical, it fits into the incomplete collection of known facts, it has emotional appeal for some people, but it can never be proved or disproved. Good people can take such theories seriously; that doesn’t make them true, or scientific. Giving a theory the status of a fact moves thought from the category of "science" to the category of "religion," and I prefer my Christianity neat, not watered down with other religions. I don't mind at all a discussion of "If this fossil is what I think it is...," nor do I mind the most literal interpretations of the stories in the book of Genesis, but I don't think it's either good science or good religion to blather about "the myths of Creation and the facts of Evolution." That' is, in my opinion, proselytizing for an antichristian religion that's been tagged as "Scientism," a thoroughly unscientific worship of scientists...

So, when I found And It Was Good in a public library, some years after its publication, I can’t say I was thrilled by L’Engle’s treatment of the stories of the Creation as myths to which writers can add whatever fanciful details they like. The whimsies L’Engle adds to the story of Cain illuminate a serious Christian consideration of moral responsibility, and prefigure the speculative novel later published as Many Waters…but, but…that’s just not the way many Christians were taught to approach Bible stories.

If, like me, you find it simpler to say that our faith is that life on Earth was created (because that takes fewer leaps of credulity than believing it evolved without some sort of “intelligent design”), then you may feel that L’Engle wastes a lot of words, and mental energy, philosophizing about something you could have explained much more simply—“elegantly,” if you will. Christians believe that our world was created by a Supreme Being, a force of “Powerful Goodness,” and that originally our Creator pronounced it good; what was not good came later. Once you accept the idea of a Creator there is no reason to doubt any of the extraordinary things the Bible writers say the Creator has done. We have not necessarily been told how it was done. There is no reason to feel positive that what the words they used suggest to our minds is what we would have seen and heard if we had been there when whatever they tried to describe happened, but also no reason to doubt that, if the Creator did choose some extraordinary ways to make things happen, a Being capable of creating life could have done those things too.

A Being capable of creating life could have evolved it through "more primitive" forms of life as easily as created it by fiat, and the Bible never says that when the waters parted and the dry land appeared, there were no fossils from previous eras of which we are told nothing. The Bible not only never says that there were no dinosaurs, but affirms that ancient people were familiar with an idea of "dragons." But We. Do. Not. Know.

“How can the world be round,” a nineteenth century literalist supposedly exclaimed, “when the Bible speaks of its four corners?” At tremendous risk and expense, in the twentieth century a few humans were able to step back and get a look at the world, and it is round. There is no need to make fun of the literalist, though. Israel and its surrounding countries, the Bible writer’s world, occupy a piece of earth bounded almost entirely by water, technically a peninsula rather than a large island or small continent, and its shape is basically four-cornered.

Those ancient kings of whom nothing is known, who lived hundreds of years, the one of them who was closest to God living fewer years than the others. L’Engle apparently had not read that non-Hebrew historians had the same list of long-gone kings whose dynasties lasted the same numbers of years that the book of Genesis suggests the individual kings lived.

Even the ages of Moses’ ancestors, which some people find hard to believe…Some Christians dogmatically believe that this family lived their lives at about half the speed most people do, and Sarah gave birth at age ninety and Jacob’s thirteen (or more) children were all born after he was seventy, because of their faith in a God with Whom all things are possible. The Creator has in fact given a minority of humans “longevity genes.” Maybe the family of Abraham were given super-longevity genes to impress the Semitic tribes to whom they preached against the apparently prevalent custom of human sacrifice. Maybe. Then again, in some cultures, especially in climates that have wet and dry “seasons” rather than hot, cold, and transitional seasons, time is counted in seasons, two to a year.

The Bible does not contradict itself on the deep level at which it has meaning, but it does contain disparities. Maybe the lesson to be learned is that “we’ll understand it better by and by.” That we are hard-wired to believe in Powerful Goodness suggests that there must be some truth behind our belief. The Bible is by far the most credible ancient document of this belief…but our faith needs to be in God, rather than in the details of any ancient document.

L’Engle plays with the details, teasing psychological meaning out of them. Maybe her poetic visions are true. Maybe in the afterlife Moses will tell her “That is not what I meant, at all.” Who knows. L’Engle does take some pains, in this book and in her other Christian books, to make a clear distinction between what Christianity has historically taught and what L’Engle, personally, thought.

It was probably this more sophisticated (High Church) Anglican thought, reflected in those of their books that are most accessible to children, that got both L’Engle and C.S. Lewis onto a list of books some busybody recommended not making available to children. This list was misreported to L’Engle as a list of “pornographic” books, and she marvels both at being compared with Lewis and with either writer’s being considered “pornographic.” (Sometimes I wish now that, while she was living, I’d written to tell her that I started buying her books at the same time I started buying Lewis’s and, since the main difference between Anglicans and Episcopalians is nationality, I found many similarities.) As all book lovers remember, the only references to sex in either the Narnia books or the series that started with A Wrinkle in Time are the words that have genders: he, she, mother, father. What would have scared the busybody would be the “Christian mythology.” Is it impious to imagine God incarnated in a world of rational animals as a Lion? In Wrinkle the “three ladies” who guide the children on their adventure aren’t called angels, but it’s fairly obvious that they’re meant to be messengers of God teaching the children how to be messengers from God. “Apprentice angels” is my phrase not L’Engle’s. I’m comfortable with the idea of Christians thinking of ourselves as apprentice angels. Not everyone is. We are not yet pure spirits, like the angels, that can survive travel between solar systems; perhaps we will be. I’m not perturbed by the idea of God choosing to incarnate as a talking lion in a world different from ours, either, and I’m comfortable with the cute little fauns in Narnia and the hobbits in Middle-Earth too. Not everyone is. L’Engle usually managed to sustain the dry bemused tone with which she reports how people just didn’t understand her work, in And It Was Good; my take on a late work, The Rock That Is Higher, was that in that late work the old lady indulged in a bit of whining. Some people should only apply the creativity with which they misread other people’s books to writing books of their own.

The explanation of the misunderstanding is also discussed, briefly, in And It Was Good. Christianity is not Positive Thinking, which tries to dismiss unpleasant things as “negative,” not really there. Christianity has historically recognized that evil things, evildoers, and an Evil Principle exist. Neither is Christianity a dualistic philosophy in which good and evil are equal or balance each other. Christianity teaches that Powerful Goodness will prevail in the end. L’Engle, like her characters, got through difficult times by clinging to memories of good things. Yet the Evil Principle often—some Christians say, consciously and deliberately—corrupts even the best things. No writer is infallible. Anyone who writes very much has written some things that were wrong, that might have confused, deceived, or distracted somebody somewhere.

Sincere Christian readers criticize Christian books (as I’m doing here) and recommend them with reservations, but we don’t want them banned or censored; we recognize that even something that harmed us might have helped someone else. One person’s temptation to a bad investment of time or money may be another’s encouragement to a good one; one person’s “soft on New Age groups like that awful cult that…” is another’s “Blessed may this author be for affirming that there are good things about my non-Christian heritage.” There are books—as a bookseller I’ve received some books—that, upon thoughtful reading, we decide may be most useful for their bulk, to raise a seat or cover a crack, or perhaps for their chemical properties, to absorb water or light fires. I’ve burned multiple copies of once-popular novels in which characters have sex at age twelve (or under), doctors prescribe medications that would be likely to kill patients in real life, anyone speaking as an expert recommends something that’s now known to be counterproductive. I’m not going to resell those books; others have a right to sell their copies if they choose. I’d agree with, and extend, something L’Engle said in And It Was Good: it’s when I confuse my bookseller’s right to choose my stock with the Voice of God, and start pontificating, ‘Nobody should read this, nobody should see it, it should be banned,” that I am in grave spiritual danger.

I recommend And It Was Good to those who would like to know more about the author of A Wrinkle in Time, to all students of women’s history and especially of women’s spirituality. For those who want to know more about the Bible and Christianity, other books would be better studied before this one. I like this book very much; every book is not meant, does not need, to be a first book on its topic.