Rules and Magic in Narnia

"Remember, however, that to be breakable is not the same as to be perishable. Strike a glass, and it will not endure an instant; simply do not strike it, and it will endure a thousand years. Such, it seemed, was the joy of man, either in elfland or on earth; the happiness depended on NOT DOING SOMETHING which you could at any moment do and which, very often, it was not obvious why you should not do. Now, the point here is that to ME this did not seem unjust...And it seemed to me that existence was itself so very eccentric a legacy that I could not complain of not understanding the limitations of the vision when I did not understand the vision they limited. The frame was no stranger than the picture. The veto might well be as wild as the vision; it might be as startling as the sun, as elusive as the waters, as fantastic and terrible as the towering trees." - G. K. Chesterton, The Ethics of Elfland

This passage reminds me of two things that also relate to one another: the creation story in Genesis, and the creation story in The Magician's Nephew. Lewis obviously intended to convey this principle in TMN to allude to God's creation of the world in Genesis, and the strange ethics that accompany both places are explained in Ethics. They are a guard to remain in life and goodness, and I would wager to add on to Chesterton's hypothesis and say that the reason there is a guard for bad things (rather than bad things simply not existing at all) is because good would not be good without absence of good to compare it to. The ethics of Narnia was simply to not bring any evil into it, as it was a world that could be entered and therefore enter with evil in tow, as Digory did. The ethics of Eden were a little different - to not eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The knowledge of good and evil was not necessary to enjoy life in the garden, but the opportunity for evil to come, the possibility of an evil and a protection against it, allowed for the inhabitants of the garden to continually choose good over evil, making the choice of goodness and the choice to be with the Lord more intimate.