[Greetings, friends, from Austin! I am back in Austin for a few weeks after a 26-hour drive back from Montana full of the C.S. Lewis audiobooks and podcast commentary (specifically related to Lewis’ Ransom Trilogy).
The Ransom Trilogy starts with Out of the Silent Planet, moves to Perelandra, and ends with That Hideous Strength. It’s a series of supposal science fiction stories that ask, “What would happen if an upright man journeyed through the heavens and found it full of divine life?”
Over the course of the Ransom Trilogy (often mistakenly called the Space Trilogy), Lewis reveals a universe of “powers and principalities” inspired by the Medieval Model (discussed in On the Discarded Image) and governed by a cosmic hierarchy of material and spiritual beings. Part of his effort was a response to one of the predominant beliefs of his day (which persists in ours): space is a cold and dark vacuity devoid of life. What if, instead, Lewis invites us to ask, it was teeming with light and life? “If we could even effect in one percent of our readers a change-over from the conception of Space to the conception of Heaven, we should have made a beginning.”1
This essay is the first of three installments of the Ransom Trilogy (one essay per book). As the first, it looks at the first book, Out of the Silent Planet, and offers something of a summary and reflection. If you have not yet read On the Discarded Image, I recommend reading that article before this one (and definitely before reading the book).
Keep in mind a bit of cultural context as you read this essay: Out of the Silent Planet was published in 1938, the year that Time Magazine declared Adolf Hitler “Man of the Year” for being “the newsmaker who most influenced world events for better or worse.” The world was on the precipice of World War II. Everyone was on edge. Dark forces were at work in the world, and a great battle was brewing.]
For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places. ~ Ephesians 6:12
Out of the Silent Planet begins with the bachelor scholar and philologist, Elwin Ransom, out on a walking tour in the English countryside, tired after a long day and looking for a place to stay. After a series of strange events involving Ransom’s attempt to assist a rural mother whose son has not come home from work at a house down the road, Ransom finds himself in the shadowy home of two men (Weston and Devine) who originally intended to take the mother’s boy as a captive for an interplanetary sacrifice but now settled for Ransom (whom they drug and take aboard their ship bound for the planet Malacandra, which we later learn to be Mars).
In these opening scenes, we learn about the corrupt characteristics of Ransom’s captors—each representing a dark inclination of the Western world (as symbolized by their names… Weston being a symbol of an overreaching West and Devine being a deviation from divine). Weston is a man of science, dedicated singularly to the belief that humanity could, and should, perfect itself into a master race that conquers and colonizes the entire universe. Devine, a former schoolmate of Ransom, is a man of earthly delights, interested only in financing Weston’s expedition to space for the riches that await.
When Ransom awakes on the spaceship, he is first filled with fear and dread, but that quickly gives way to wonder at the majesty of the heavens he finds himself in. Far from a void and vacuum, he concludes it is a crime how often we refer to it as space… for it is not empty of life but overflowing with it.2
[H]e felt his body and mind daily rubbed and scoured and filled with new vitality… [Ransom discovered] a spiritual cause for his progressive lightening and exultation of heart. A nightmare, long engendered in the modern mind by the mythology that follows in the wake of science was falling off him. He had read of ‘Space’: at the back of his thinking for years had lurked the dismal fancy of the black, cold vacuity, the utter deadness, which was supposed to separate the worlds. He had not known how much it affected him till now—now that the very name ‘Space’ seems a blasphemous libel for this empyrean ocean of radiance in which they swam. He could not call it ‘dead’; he felt life pouring into him from it every moment… He had thought it barren: he saw now that it was the womb of worlds, whose blazing and innumerable offspring looked down nightly even upon the earth with so many eyes—and here, with how many more! No: space was the wrong name. Older thinkers had been wiser when they named it simply the heavens—the heavens which declared the glory…3
As they approach Malacandra, Ransom overhears Weston and Devine reveal their plans to turn Ransom over to the inhabitants as a sacrifice. Terror grips Ransom as he imagines what horrors await him and starts to plan his escape (by suicide if necessary).
Shortly after landing and beginning to make camp, a watery serpent rushes the three humans. Taking advantage of the chaos and confusion, Ransom escapes into the mysterious landscape of Malacandra and starts to soak it in. At first, he struggles to make sense of it all: lakes, streams, and rivers are warm, gravity is significantly lower than on Earth, and plants and mountains are all extremely tall and thin.
One by one, Ransom meets the three native species of the planet, finding each of them to be not as hostile as he had imagined but friendly and civilized. First are the hrossa, sentient beings resembling otters in body and warrior poets at heart, who take Ransom into their village, teach him the language of the Malacandrans (Old Solar), and inform him that he comes from Thulcandra—the Silent Planet. When a visit from an eldil (an angelic creature invisible to Ransom, but audible) arrives and announces that Ransom must go to meet Oyarsa (the planet’s ruler and greatest of the eldil on Malacandra), Ransom is sent along to meet the second species, the sorn—tall and thin bodied philosopher shepherds—who reveal that the reason Earth is bent and silent is that it has no upright Oyarsa… “because every one of [the humans] wants to be a little Oyarsa himself.”4
After conversing with the sorn, Ransom is ushered along and led down into a river valley, where a ferry takes him to the island of Meldilorn, home of the Oyarsa who called Ransom. Upon entering Meldilorn, Ransom meets the third and final species of Malacandra, the pfifltrigg—resembling frogs in body, they are the engineers and architects of the planet. Note: with the introduction of the pfifltrigg, Lewis’ parallel to Plato’s Republic is complete. On Malacandra, we have three different species (like the workers, guardians, and philosophers in the Republic) and something like a Utopic vision of beings living together in harmony and in right relationship with the divine.
It is in Meldilorn that Ranson starts to see the numinous eldila:
Like the silvery noises in the air, these footsteps of light were shy of observation. Where he looked hardest they were least to be seen: on the edges of his field of vision they came crowding as though a complex arrangement of them were there in progress. To attend to any one of them was to make it invisible, and the minute brightness seemed often to have just lef the spot where his eyes fell. He had no doubt that he was ‘seeing’—as much as he ever would see—the eldila. The sensation it produced in him was curious. It was not exactly uncanny not as if he were surrounding by ghosts. It was not even as if he were being spied upon; he had rather the sense of being looked at by things that had a right to look. His feeling was less than fear; it had in it something of embarrassment, something of shyness, something of submission, and it was profoundly uneasy.5
Shortly after arriving in Meldilorn, an eldil comes to Ransom while he is preparing to sleep and announces, “Oyarsa sends for you.” “His old terrors of meeting some monster or idol had quite left him: he felt nervous as he remembered feeling on the morning of an examination when he was an undergraduate.”6 Obeying the order, Ransom exits his house and is paraded through a tunnel of Malacandran citizens to stand before Oyarsa.7
It is here that the story comes to its climax. The Oyarsa explains to Ransom that there is an Oyarsa for each planet in the solar system. The planet that Ransom comes from, Thulcandra (or Earth), is called silent because it houses the Bent One (Satan), who was bound there by a lunar boundary forcefield after the “a great war.”
Once we knew the Oyarsa of your world—he was brighter and greater than I—and then we did not call it Thulcandra. It is the longest of all stories and the bitterest. He became bent. That was before any life came on your world. Those were the Bent Years of which we still speak in the heavens, when he was not yet bound to Thulcandra but free like us. It was in his mind to spoil other worlds besides his own. He smote your moon with his left hand and with his right he brought the cold death… We did not leave him so at large for long. There was great war, and we drove him back out of the heavens and bound him in the air of his own world as Maleldil taught us. There doubtless he lies to this hour, and we know no more of that planet: it is silent.8
Here, of course, Lewis takes inspiration from the Christian conception of the War in Heaven referenced in Revelation:
Then war broke out in heaven. Michael and his angels fought against the dragon, and the dragon and his angels fought back. But he was not strong enough, and they lost their place in heaven. The great dragon was hurled down—that ancient serpent called the devil, or Satan, who leads the whole world astray. He was hurled to the earth, and his angels with him.9
As Oyarsa reveals the mysteries of the cosmos to Ransom, the conversation is interrupted by the arrival of Devine and Weston, who are brought before the village by the hrossa and held to account for their killing of three hrossa. Taking turns to justify themselves, each of the bent men betrays their corrupt and nefarious intentions.
Using Ransom as his translator, Weston gives a long speech justifying his proposed invasion of Malacandra on “progressive” and evolutionary grounds, making the case that humanity, being the highest race, has the right and obligation to spread throughout the universe, abandoning each planet and star system as its resources are exhausted and it becomes uninhabitable. As for Devine’s desire, it becomes clear that all he cares for is the suns’ blood (gold) that the planet contains.
Declaring the men bent beyond repair, Oyarsa spares their lives but demands they leave Malacandra immediately, offering only Ransom the option to stay (though Ransom rejects the offer and decides to return to Earth). The three men make the perilous voyage back to Earth, surviving only with the help of the eldila ushering them on their way.
The book ends with Lewis introducing himself as a character and identifying the (fictional) origins of the novel: Lewis had written a letter to Ransom asking whether the philologist had come across the Latin word Oyarses, which Lewis had discovered in the work of a medieval Neoplatonist. That letter prompted Ransom to share his secret with Lewis… it was the only way, Ransom said, to stop Weston from doing further evil given “the rapid march of [contemporary] events.”
And we also have evidence—increasing almost daily—that ‘Weston’ or the force or forces behind ‘Weston,’ will play a very important part in the events of the next few centuries, and, unless we prevent them, a very disastrous one… The dangers to be feared are not planetary but cosmic, or at least solar, and they are not temporal but eternal.10
For me to say more would be unwise.
C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet, p. 152.
Later, we learn that the planets—Earth especially—are voids in the solar system.
C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet, p. 34.
C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet, p. 102.
C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet, p. 109.
C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet, p. 117.
The Oyéresu (singular Oyarsa) control the course of nature on each of the planets of the Solar System and are higher than the eldila, which are science-fictionalised depictions of angels, immortal and holy. In the postscript of Out of the Silent Planet, Lewis identifies the name Oyarsa as derived from the use of Oyarses by Bernard Silvestris in Cosmographia to describe the governors of the celestial spheres (probably itself derived from Greek ousiarches or “lords of being,” and used with the same meaning in the Hermetic Asclepius). In the various installments of the Ransom Trilogy, Ransom meets the Oyéresu of Mars and Venus, who are described as masculine (but not actually male) and feminine (but not actually female), respectively. The Oyéresu of other worlds have characteristics like those of the corresponding classical gods… e.g., the Oyarsa of Jupiter gives a feeling of merriment (joviality). Thus, Lewis imagines a universe where the spirits of the planets are Oyéresu but that the Greeks and Romans were wrong to worship them as gods when, in fact, they are angels, faithful servants of the one and only true God, Maleldil. This identification of the Greco-Roman gods as improperly worshipped angels is a tradition traced back to late medieval and Renaissance times.
C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet, p. 120.
Revelation 12:7–10 (NIV).
C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet, p. 151-152.