[Greetings, friends, from Austin! This week, I finished working through the second book in C.S. Lewis’ Ranson Trilogy: Perelandra. It comes after Out of the Silent (which I covered in On the Silent Planet) and before That Hideous Strength (which I hope to write about in a few weeks).
Perelandra continues the adventures of Dr. Elwin Ransom as he is sent by angels (eldila) to a new planet, Perelandra (or Venus), inside a spaceship shaped like a coffin. When Ransom arrives, he has this mysterious sense that he is participating in a myth and wonders multiple times throughout the tale whether all myths on Earth are just shadows of real happenings in other worlds.
He opened his eyes and saw a strange heraldically coloured tree loaded with yellow fruits and silver leaves. Round the base of the indigo stem was coiled a small dragon covered with scales of red gold. He recognised the garden of the Hersperides at once. ‘This is the most vivid dream I have ever had,’ he thought. By some means or other he then realised that he was awake; but extreme comfort and some trace-like quality, both in the sleep which had just left and in the experience to which he had awaked, kept him lying motionless. He remembered how in the very different world called Malacandra—that cold, archic world, as it now seemed to him—he had met the original of the Cyclops, a giant in a cave and a shephered. Were all the things which appeared as mythology on earth scattered through other worlds as realitites? … [A]t that moment he had a sensation not of following an adventure but of enacting a myth. To be the figure that he was in this unearthy pattern appeared sufficient.1
What unfolds is an echo of Eden, a new telling of the temptation of Eve. This is the myth that Ransom finds himself in as he struggles with why he was sent to this new world. He first meets the Green Lady (a human-like lady with skin the color of unfallen nature) and finds out there is one rule on Perelandra: they must not stay on Fixed Land (this is like the prohibition against eating from the Tree of Good and Evil).
Then lands Weston, the antagonistic professor from Out of the Silent Planet, who assumes the role of the serpent and chief tempter in the drama after inviting the spirit of Satan in:
‘In so far as I am the conductor of the central forward pressure of the universe, I am it. Do you see, you timid, scruple-mongering fool? I am the Universe. I, Weston, am your God and your Devil. I call that Force into me completely…’ … Then horrible things began happening. A spasm like that preceding a deadly vomit twisted Weston’s face out of recognition.2
And so, Weston is made into the Unman and the stage is set for the struggle that plays out in the rest of Perelandra. Weston wants to corrupt nature and convince the innocent Green Lady to break Maleldil’s (i.e., God’s) one arbitrary rule. Ransom knows he must do everything in his power to protect the planet and oppose Weston.
In the back-and-forth dialogue between Eve of Perelandra, the Unman, and Ransom, which makes up most of the book, Lewis invites us to reflect on faith and the nature of good and evil… What does faith require? How does evil attack faith? How far must we go to oppose evil? These are the questions that Lewis wrestles with in Perelandra, undoubtedly influenced by the events of World War II at the time the book was written.
It is to those questions and reflections that we devote the rest of today’s essay.]
Shortly after Ransom arrives on Perelandra and meets its only apparent intelligent occupant (the Green Lady), a strange rule takes center stage of the entire novel: on orders from Maleldil (i.e., the God or Christ-like figure in this universe), inhabitants must not stay on Fixed Land. Like Eden’s restriction on eating from the Tree of Good and Evil, it is a command that is (somewhat) arbitrary.
As soon as the antagonist, Weston (who becomes the Unman by inviting the Dark Spirit into him entirely), arrives, he becomes singularly and obsessively focused on convincing the Green Lady to disobey Perelandra’s one rule.
‘You are becoming your own [said Weston]. That is what Maleldil wants you to do. That is why He has let you be separated from the King and even, in a way, from Himself. His way of making you older is to make you make yourself older. And yet [Ransom] would have you sit still and wait for Maleldil to do it all.’ … [T]he command against living on the Fixed Island is not [good]. You have already learned that He gave no such command to my world. And you cannot see where the goodness of it is. No wonder. If it were really good, must He not have commanded it to all worlds alike? For how could Maleldil not command what was good? There is no good in it. Maleldil Himself is showing you that, this moment, through your own reason… [he wants you] to break it.3
Over and over, the Green Lady listens to the Unman make his case in repeated conversations as Ransom looks on. Throughout the dialogue, there are moments when Ransom believes she has been persuaded and her will to obey has been lost. But every time, she manages to snap back before crossing the line, coming to some version of the realization that Weston, the Unman, is speaking nonsense.
How can I step out of His will save into something that cannot be wished? Shall I start trying not to love Him—or the King—or the beasts? It would be like trying to walk on water or swim through islands. Shall I try not to sleep or to drink or to laugh? I thought your words [, Weston,] had a meaning. But now it seems they have none. To walk out of His will is to walk into nowhere.4
Though not present for all of the talks between Unman and the Green Lady, Ransom occasionally offers rebuttals when the opportunity presents itself in the order of conversation. At one point, Ransom has this to say about the peculiar prohibition against staying on Fixed Land:
‘I think He made one law of that kind in order that there might be obedience. In all these other matters what you call obeying Him is but doing what seems good in your own eyes also. Is love content with that? You do them, indeed, because they are His will, but not only because they are His will. Where can you taste the joy of obeying unless He bids you do something for which His bidding is the only reason? When we spoke last you said that if you told the beasts to walk on their heads, they would delight to do so. So I know that you understand well what I am saying.’5
As the conversation pattern between the three continues, Ransom slowly realizes that the Unman will never relent. With each (unsuccessful) temptation of the Unman, the feeling that his corruptive efforts will eventually succeed if he is allowed to persist grows in Ransom, who is certain now (after witnessing the Unman disembowel frogs for no reason) that what stands before him is not Weston but something entirely evil:
Ransom perceived that he had never before seen anything but half-hearted and uneasy attempts at evil. This creature was whole-hearted. The extremity of its evil had passed beyond all struggle into some state which bore a horrible similarity to innocence. It was beyond vice as the Lady was beyond virtue.6
Coming to this realization, Ransom begins to wrestle with God—why had Maleldil allowed the dark force to go to Perelandra without bringing a light force to oppose it? Then it dawns on him: perhaps it is he who was brought to represent the good. Perhaps it is up to him to physically fight this enemy or watch him succeed in corrupting Perelandra as he had in Eden.
[T]he enemy is really here, really saying and doing things. Where is Maleldil’s representative? The answer which came back to [Ransom], quick as a fencer’s or a tennis player’s riposte, out of the silence and the darkness, almost took his breath away. It seemed Blasphemous. ‘Anyway, what can I do?’ babbled the voluble self. ‘I’ve done all I can. I’ve talked till I’m sick of it. It’s no good, I tell you.’ He tried to persuade himself that he, Ransom, could not possibly be Maleldil’s representative as the Un-man was the representative of Hell. The suggestion was, be argued, itself diabolical—a temptation to fatuous pride, to megalomania. He was horrified when a darkness simply flung back this argument in his face, almost impatiently. And then—he wondered how it had escaped him till now—he was forced to perceive that his own coming to Perelandra was at least as much of a marvel as the Enemy’s. The miracle on the right side, which he had demanded, had in fact occurred. He himself was the miracle.7
Coming to grips with what he must do, Ransom works up the courage to engage Weston, and the two square up. After a brief skirmish, Weston (or, rather, the Unman) goes on the run. Ransom chases him down across the sea and into a deep cavern, where he finishes the Unman with a stone to the face, though not without suffering a few wounds of his own (including a mysterious wound on his heel that will not stop bleeding).8
After taking his time to recover from the encounter, Ransom eventually begins the trip back—traveling over seas, through trees, and up mountains before coming mysterious into the presence of two great Oyarsa (Malacandra and Venus, themselves) and witnessing, alongside them, a great ceremony between the Green Lady (now Queen) and her King… the unfallen Adam and Eve of Perelandra.
Seeing Ransom, the King addresses him as “Maleldil’s instrument” and the Queen tells him of her revelation regarding the Fixed Lands:
‘As soon as you had taken away the Evil One,’ she said, ‘and I awoke from sleep, my mind was cleared. It is a wonder to me, Piebald, that for all those days you and I could have been so young. The reason for not yet living on the Fixed Island is now so plain. How could I wish to live there except because it was Fixed? And why should I desire the Fixed except to make sure—to be able on one day to command where I should be the next and what should happen to me? It was to reject the wave—to draw my hands out of Maleldil’s, to say to Him, ‘Not thus but thus’—to put in our own power what times should roll towards us… as if you gathered fruits together to-day for to-morrow’s eating instead of taking what came. That would have been cold love and feeble trust. And out of it how could we ever have climbed back into love and trust again? …
‘I see it well,’ said Ransom. ‘Though in my world it would pass for folly. We have been evil for so long’—and then he stopped, doubtful of being understood and surprised that he had used a word for evil which he had not hitherto known that he knew, and which he had not heard either in Mars or in Venus.9
It is here that Perelandra’s one rule—no staying on Fixed Land—starts to make perfect sense (despite the common Christian imagery of God and his Word as solid rock). On Perelandra, the Fixed Islands mirror man’s desire to be in control and out of the waves. To stay on the Fixed Islands is to declare “not His will but mine be done.” It was to avoid the uncertainties and doubts of faith in the interest of personal comfort.
But that is not what faith and obedience require. Faith requires being swallowed by the sea, if that’s where we’re called. It is a total submission that follows regardless of the personal cost. It trusts that what waits on the other side of the sacrifice is something greater than what we let go of.
The decision to select what we want over what He wants—to cling to what we desire rather than what’s been given—is how we put ourselves in a personal Hell. As Lewis notes in The Great Divorce:
There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, ‘Thy will be done,’ and those to whom God says, in the end, ‘Thy will be done.’ All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell. No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. Those who knock it is opened.10
Through Perelandra, slowly an image of the nature of evil is unveiled. Weston, the Unman, is made evil incarnate when he is seized by the “eldil who clung longer [to the old good instead of taking the good that came]—who has been clinging since before the worlds were made.”11 Forever cast out of the light by a desire to assert his will, the Father of Lies can only work through the whispering of invitations and silent nudges to reject His will… to reject fate believing we know what’s best better than He; to see our desires and wills as a higher priority than His; to see our interests and self as the center.
This is the invitation of the Dark One that wants us outside the Light of His will with him. This is the spirit of hubris that cast him out and his fate is ours when we follow his footsteps. This is the nature of evil and how it tries to spread in Perelandra using temptations to entice others out of His will... offering freedom but delivering only a cold and dark emptiness.
In this characterization of evil as a deviation from His will, we see an echo of a medieval belief recognized by Boethius and Augustine and known as the privation theory of evil. In the Consolation of Philosophy, Boethius describes evil as the absence of good, as dark is the absence of light and nonbeing is the absence of being:
We agreed before that everything that exists is unitary, and that oneness itself is good. It then follows that everything, because it exists, is good. And it also follows that whatever falls from goodness ceases to exist, and that evil men cease to be what they were, having by their wickedness lost their human nature, although they still survive in the form of the human body.12
This passage from Boethius mirrors St. Augustine’s conception of evil in his Confessions: creation is fundamentally good, and evil is merely the absence of good.13 Evil entered the world with original sin, which constituted a turn away from God, the highest good, and towards the human self, a lesser good… thus, evil itself has no substance but is merely a reorientation away from the supreme good that is God.
In Perelandra, we see how this type of evil might work in the world. It starts with a small corruption which opens the staircase and starts the downward journey... a seemingly insignificant decision to reject the gift given for the one expected. The second step is like the first but marginally more intense, inviting disobedience to take place in the heart through a fixation and obsession with the forbidden. The third descent looks to capitalize on what has grown in the heart, encouraging a full stepping out of the will of Maledil and into the spirit of Satan, which slowly consumes the further one descends. From there, the floodgates are open and the stairs become slide, spiraling all the way to the bottom.
It does not matter how small the sins are provided that their cumulative effect is to edge the man away from the Light and out into the Nothing. Murder is no better than cards if cards can do the trick. Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one—the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.14
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P.S. Arguably, my favorite passage in the book comes toward the novel's end. After Weston is defeated, Ransom meets the King and Queen of Paradise preserved and converses with the Oyarsa of Mars and Venus before being sent back to Earth in his coffin. In the passage, Ransom discovers the mysteries of myth:
With deep wonder he thought to himself, ‘My eyes have seen Mars and Venus. I have seen Ares and Aphrodite.’ He asked them how they were known to the old poets of Tellus. When and from whom had the children of Adam learned that Ares was a man of war and that Aphrodite rose from the sea foam? Earth has been besieged, and enemy-occupied territory, since before history began. The gods have had no commerce there. How then do we know of them? It comes, they told him, a long way round and through many stages. There is an environment of minds as well as of space. The universe is one—a spider’s web wherein each mind lives along every line, a cast whispering gallery where (save for the direction action of Maleldil) though no news travels unchanged yet no secret can be rigorously kept. In the mind of the fallen Archon under whom our planet groans, the memory of Deep Heaven and the gods with whom he once consorted is still alive. Nay, in the very matter of our world, the traces of the celestial commonwealth are not quite lost. Memory passes through the womb and hovers in the air. The Muse is a real thing. A faint breath, as Virgil says, reaches even the late generations. Our mythology is based on a solider reality than we dream: but it is also at an almost infinite distance from that base. And when they told him this, Ransom at last understood why mythology was what it was—gleams of celestial strength and beauty falling on a jungle of filth and imbecility. His cheeks burned on behalf of our race when he looked on the true Mars and Venus and remembered the follies that have been talked of them on Earth.15
C.S. Lewis, Perelandra (“Perelandra”), p. 40, 42.
Perelandra, p. 82.
Perelandra, p. 99-100.
Perelandra, p. 100.
Perelandra, p. 101.
Perelandra, p. 94. Lewis no doubt had Hitler and the Nazis in mind when writing Perelandra and the character of Weston. At what point was force justified in opposing the Nazis? When did they cross the line into irredeemable evil (which everyone agrees they did, in fact, cross)? When do other, more morally ambiguous individuals cross the line? These are all (tough) questions that Lewis invites us to ask. In the case of Weston, the question is relatively easy because we are told he is wholly evil to the point of no longer resisting murderous impulses. But real life is rarely so black and white.
Perelandra, p. 120.
For those familiar with Arthurian legend, this gives Ransom a likeness to the Fisher King.
Perelandra, p. 178.
C.S. Lewis, Great Divorce, p. 75.
Perelandra, p. 71.
Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy, Book IV, Ch. III.
See Augustine, Confessions, Book VII, Chapter XII, Paragraph 18. See also Augustine, City of God, Book XI.
C.S. Lewis, Screwtape Letters, p. 60-61.
Perelandra, p. 172-173.
Unique, quite mythological, relatable, and interesting. Especially, liked the passages about gradual descendence towards Evil and hell, and how myths work. And, also about what FAITH truly is.Thank u for sharing this one.
Travel light, Follow the light, be the light🙏🏼❤️