C-Essay on Lewis' Space Trilogy, part 1

[Bengt-Ove]

Denna C-uppsats skrevs under mina engelskstudier vid Västerås högskola 1994.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Creed and Myth in C.S. Lewis’ “Space Trilogy”

WITH A BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION


C.S. LEWIS – A BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION.


Glimpses of Joy and Loss of His Mother. 2
School. 2
The War, and Academic Life. 3
Conversion, and “Myth become Fact” 4
Scholar and Author 4
The Inklings. 5
“Surprised by Joy” 5

CREED AND MYTH IN LEWIS’ “SPACE TRILOGY”

Background of the Trilogy. 6

OUT OF THE SILENT PLANET 8

Synopsis. 8
Medieval Perspectives and Lewis’ Myth of Deep Heaven. 9
Lewis’ View on Science Fiction. 10
Critics on Out of the Silent Planet. 11

PERELANDRA 12

Synopsis. 12
Biblical Backgrounds and Themes
in Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra 13
Ransom as a Christ Symbol in Perelandra. 14
The Influence of Milton’s Paradise Lost. 14
A personal Life-force v. the Biblical God 15
The Fall. 15
Critics on Perelandra. 17

THAT HIDEOUS STRENGTH 18
18
Synopsis. 20
Arthurian Mythology in That Hideous Strength. 20
The Realm of Logres and the Pendragon. 20
The Fisher-King, and Ransom. 21
Merlin. 21
Lewis’ Use of Arthurian Symbols. 22
The Tower of Babel
and the Myth of Deep Heaven in That Hideous Strength 22
Critics on That Hideous Strength. 23
The Abolition of Man. 25
The Missing Part. 25
Critics on The Dark Tower 26
Conclusion 26

Notes 27
Literature list 28

Glimpses of Joy, and Loss of His Mother.

Clive Staples Lewis was born on the 29th of November1898 in one of the inner suburbs of Belfast, the son of a solicitor and of a clergyman’s daughter. He was the younger of two brothers. His brother Warren, although more than three years his senior, soon became his trusted friend and companion in a friendship that would last unbroken until the death of C. S. in 1963. In his memoir of his brother, Warren Lewis points to a significant circumstance in their early life together: the wetness of Irish weather.1 Compared to children of today, Clive and his brother spent an extraordinary amount of their time shut up indoors. This recurring imprisonment stimulated the creative imagination of the two brothers. C.S. wrote later in life: “I am a product of long corridors, empty sunlit rooms, upstairs indoor silences, attics explored in solitude ... also of endless books.” (Surprised by Joy, p. 14). Clive soon became a voracious reader of the multitude of books in his parent’s library. His reading centered on children’s classics like the Beatrix Potter books, and on grown-up’s classics like Swift’s Gulliver´s Travels.

At the age of seven C.S. for the first time had an encounter with what he later called “Joy”, which was to have great significance in his search for a deeper spiritual meaning in life:

“...there suddenly arose in me without warning ... a sensation of desire; but desire
for what? ... and before I knew what I desired, the desire itself was gone, the whole
glimpse withdrawn. In a certain sense everything that had ever happened to me was
insignificant in comparison.” (p. 19)

At this age Clive or Jack (as he asked to be called and remained to his friends throughout his life) already wrote and illustrated his own stories. In August 1908, when Clive was 9, a great loss befell the Lewis family with the death of his mother Flora. For Clive, the death of his mother marked the end of the security and tranquility of his childhood up to now: “There was to be much fun, many pleasures and many stabs of Joy, but no more of the old security. It was sea and islands now, the great continent had sunk like Atlantis.” (p. 23).

School.

Clive being ten, it was decided that he be sent to the boarding school which Warren already attended, Wynyard in Watford, Hertfordshire. Being the less resilient of the two brothers and owing to his shielded existence up to now, Clive was all the worse prepared for the hardships of English boarding schools. He heartily disliked the experience. In his autobiography Surprised by Joy Lewis says that at 14 he was already desperately anxious to get rid of his religion. Conscious and unconscious motifs in coalition led to his becoming an atheist. In the classics he encountered a mass of religious ideas all of which were treated as mere illusion by all the teachers and editors. He began to seriously doubt why his own, by a fortunate exception, was exactly true: “In the midst of a thousand such religions stood our own, the thousand and first, labelled True. But on what grounds could I believe in this exception? ... I was very anxious not to.” (p. 55).

The visitations of “Joy” that Clive had experienced had now been long absent. Then one day he happened to pick up a literary supplement and his eyes fell on a headline and a picture, that was to start off a “renaissance” in his inner life.2 The words read Siegfried and the Twilight of the Gods, and the picture was one of Arthur Rackham´s illustrations to that volume. “Pure ‘Northernness’ engulfed me: a vision of huge, clear spaces hanging above the Atlantic in the endless twilight of Northern summer, remoteness, severity...” (p. 62). This experience at once brought back the memories, and he began a quest for everything “Northern”. He devoured books of Norse myths, found a synopsis of the Ring operas, and used his allowance to buy records with the music of Wagner. He also began on a heroic poem on the Wagnerian version of the Nibelung story, a task he never finished. While he indulged his fantasy in his “secret” imaginative life, his “outer” academic life went on quite separately without the one influencing the other. The two years he spent at Wyvern College were to instill in him a lifelong adversity to bullying in general and the system of “fagging” in particular. “Fagging” was the system prevalent in English boarding schools at the time which gave students of greater seniority, here named “the Bloods”, great power over the younger ones, making them into a labour pool and the common property of all the Bloods. Admission to this clique was not through formal qualification, but through being “the right sort of person” and knowing “the right people”.3

Clive took an instant dislike to these coteries and unofficial ruling groups where it was a thing of primary importance to be “inside”. In his autobiography he gives a heated account of his time at Wyvern, devoting two chapters to it while in comparison, his experiences in the World War 1 trenches are only afforded a few pages. He was also appalled by the extent of open homosexuality that existed at Wyvern. His grievances notwithstanding, Clive did well in his studies and e.g. gained attention with a brilliant translation of Horace. In his spare time he also worked on a grand poetic tragedy in Greek form about Norse gods; “Loki Bound”. At this time Clive was dreaming of a career in poetry rather than in prose. But his stubborn refusal to adapt to “fagging” and “Bloodery” made him an ideal victim to the Bloods, and after two years he decided he could stand it no longer and implored his father to remove him. His father, a man of disjointed thinking who was notable for often making the wrong decisions for once did the right thing, and took him out of Wyvern.

In September 1914 Clive arrived in Great Bookham in Surrey where he would spend two blissful years studying under the tutorship of W.T. Kirkpatrick, in whose home he also lived. Kirkpatrick, a ruthless dialectician with a big heart, had once been headmaster to Clive´s father and was one of his closest friends. It was under the tuition of Kirkpatrick that Clive learned to phrase all remarks as logical propositions and to defend his opinions by argument, something that was later to characterise his writings and his teaching. Kirkpatrick was, according to Lewis, the nearest a man could come to being a purely logical entity.4 He would later be portrayed in Lewis´s Space Trilogy as MacPhee, a grumpy Scotsman who, in the likeness of Kirkpatrick relied solely on logic and claimed to have no opinion on any subject whatsoever, but who was nevertheless prepared to give up his life if necessary in defence of Goodness. Clive was happier than he had been for many years, his writing and extensive reading in English and American literature was interrupted only by meals and daily, long walks through the Surrey countryside. His favourite reading included Milton, Spenser, Malory, the Laxdale Saga, Voltaire, Beowulf, the Kalevala, and nearly all of Morris to name some. During this time he also wrote a good deal of lyrical poetry and a romance or two in prose. One evening, while waiting for a train, Clive picked up at a bookstall Phantastes, a faerie Romance by George MacDonald. Clive did not yet know what to call this quality that rested on the woodland journeyings of the hero, but later identified it as Holiness. He found that the same voice, which had earlier called to him from remote Northern skies, was now speaking at his side in enchanted English woods.5

The War, and Academic Life.

In April 1917 he began his studies at Oxford, but World War I being at its height, he was recruited into the army before the term ended. As mentioned, his account of his war experiences is short and quite non-committal:

“I am surprised that I did not dislike the Army more. It was, of course, detestable.
But the words 'of course' drew the sting. That is where it differed from Wyvern.
Straight tribulation is easier to bear than tribulation which advertises itself as
pleasure.” (Surprised by Joy, p. 151).

Clive’s room-mate in the billets was the Irishman “Paddy” Moore. Clive spent weekends with Paddy and his mother, Mrs. Janie King Moore. She became something of a mother to him, and in the spring of 1918 when Paddy was reported missing in action in France, Clive took it upon him to live with and care for her for the rest of her life. Over the years she became increasingly demanding and mentally unstable, and many (including his brother) wondered at Clive´s uncomplaining servitude including performing countless domestic chores at her command, while at the same time being able to take care of his no less demanding studies. Warren, who for many years was a member of this menáge, admitted to feeling a profound sense of relief when she passed away in 1951.

In March 1918 Clive was wounded in action in France and, before he was fit for any further service the war was over. His studies at Oxford did not seem to suffer from the innumerable domestic chores that Mrs Moore would impose on him. He was hoping for a teaching appointment, preferably at Oxford. In 1925 Clive was elected to a Fellowship in English Language and Literature at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he was to remain for almost thirty years. He was not wholly enthusiastic about many of his collegues, among whom, in his view, intrigue and back-scratching were all to common.6 But during this period he also made friends with some dons of a like mind, who were later to form – together with Lewis – the nucleus of the fabled literary circle known as “The Inklings”. One of them was John Ronald Reuel Tolkien. Slightly older than Clive and young by the standard of Oxford professors, he totally understood and shared Clive’s love for “Northernness”. He too had first discovered the taste in childhood, and began devising a whole new mythology out of his imagination. This, of course, was to be the framework for his stories of Middle-Earth and later his epic trilogy Lord of the Rings.

Conversion, and “Myth become Fact”.

Clive found it hard to reconcile Tolkien´s apparent intelligence and impressive mental faculties with the fact that he was also a devout Catholic, who believed implicitly in the Christian dogmas that Clive himself had rejected as a teenager. Clive was beginning to suspect that the infrequent “stabs of Joy” that he had experienced over the years had their source in a Being whose existance he had discarded long ago. This “something” that had beckoned to him and which he had vainly sought in Northern mythology as well as in MacDonald´s enchanted woods was now claiming his attention and, more alarmingly, his decision. He wrote to a friend:

“Terrible things are happening to me. The ‘Spirit’ or 'Real I' is ... taking the
offensive, and behaving just like God. You´d better come on Monday at the latest,
or I may have entered a monastery.” (Letters of ..., p. 141).

But it was too late. One night in 1929 in his room at Magdalen he gave in, “... perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.” (Surprised by Joy, p. 182). He now began to see, greatly aided by long talks with Tolkien, the myths of dying gods in a new light. Were these myths in fact God expressing himself through the minds of poets, to express fragments of his eternal truth? Clive now began to believe so, and that the death and resurrection of Christ was really Myth become Fact. The pangs of a desire for he knew not what, that had spoken to him in various ways, he now recognised as “signposts”; pointers that he had mistaken for the Object to which they pointed.7 He described his spiritual experiences in allegorical form in 1933 in The Pilgrim´s Regress. (cf. Bunyan´s Pilgrim´s Progress).

Scholar and Author.

In his professional life, Lewis was gaining renown as a scholar and a literary critic. In 1936 he published The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition, which won him the Hawthornden Prize. The writing of prose came easy to Lewis. He worked fast, managing to write almost everything in one draft, and only made minimal revisions.

As for his new faith, it was to permeate Lewis´s non-professional writings from now on, novels as well as essays. Feeling that the theologians failed to do their job of making religion understandable, he saw his chief role as that of a translator; one turning Christian doctrine into the vernacular, and making it intelligible for non-theologians and the common man.8 He had great success at this; serving as wartime lecturer on Christianity for the RAF and doing talks on faith over the BBC. 1942 saw the appearance of such an unlikely pair of works as A Preface to Paradise Lost, and The Screwtape Letters, the latter dealing in a humorous way with faith from hell´s point of view, and which made him a household name, in America as well as in England.

The popularity resulting from Screwtape and his radio talks now made him the recipient of a growing stream of letters every week from his readers. Lewis´s growing popularity with readers and radio-listeners from every walk of life, some scholars, others most emphatically not, was viewed not without suspicion among some of his colleagues at Oxford University. One acquaintance of Lewis´ once walking behind two dons heard them discussing the approaching election to a professorship in English Literature; agreeing that the important thing was to vote against Lewis.9 The fact that Lewis, in spite of his academic qualifications was never offered a professorship at Oxford during his some thirty years there also seems to indicate this.

The Inklings.

No account of C. S. Lewis, or for that matter of Oxford University during the 40s, would be complete without some mention of The Inklings, the famous literary circle of which Lewis was the prime mover. The persons attending this circle were Oxford dons and other literary men of Lewis´s aquaintance. Properly speaking it was neither a club nor a society, though it partook of the nature of both. The only fixed rule was that they met in Lewis´s rooms at Magdalen every Thursday evening after dinner. The ritual of a meeting was unvarying. Tea would be produced, someone would read from his latest manuscript, and they would all sit in judgement upon it.10 These Thursday evenings offered a welcome change from academic affairs and routines, and Lewis greatly enjoyed these gatherings. The Inkling gatherings, that had been initiated in the late 1930s continued until 1955, when C.S. Lewis accepted the Professorship of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge University.

As a person Lewis was described as a stout and cheerful man with a loud voice. To some students, he seemed a demanding tutor with little patience for laxness and mediocrity of work. But many of his pupils have given affectionate accounts of Lewis as a tutor and teacher. He was known to be personally interested in his pupils and, rather than seeing himself as merely a tutor taking pupils through a course, he saw himself as a mentor; whetting the pupil´s appetites for the world of literature as well as feeding them. In Lewis´s view, reading a great book just once would be like walking once through an enchanted garden. On the second, third or fourth tour – the element of surprise suspended – you could really begin to enjoy the experience.11

“Surprised by Joy”.

In 1954 Lewis met Joy Davidman Gresham, an American Jewish divorced mother of two boys. She was one of the many readers of his books, who kept a correspondence with him by letter. On meeting her when she visited England with her boys, Lewis found her to be his match intellectually and spiritually, and he greatly enjoyed her company. Later Lewis secretly married Joy Davidman in a legal ceremony, but this was done solely to help her get a residence permit in England – she had formerly been a card-carrying Communist – and with the understanding of them maintaining a strictly platonic relationship, living apart. But in 1957 they were joined in an ecclesiastical marriage at Joy´s hospital bedside. She had cancer of the thigh and was sent home to die, but experienced a miraculous – if temporary – recovery.

She and Lewis had a belated honeymoon and experienced a time of blissful happiness although aware that what Joy experienced could be seen as a reprieve from her fatal illness, rather than a pardon.12 After two years of good health the cancer struck again and Joy died in July 1960. Filled with anguish and sorrow at Joy´s death, Lewis´s faith in a merciful God suffered its first severe crisis since his conversion and he outpoured his anguish in A Grief Observed, which he first published under a pen name. Through the book though, his bitterness at his great loss is gradually replaced by reconciliation and peace of mind. Two years later his own health deteriorated and he resigned his Professorship at Cambridge. He died on November 22, 1963.

His authorship includes such diverse styles as scholarly works on Medieval literature, literary criticism, theology, fiction, romance, and even books for children. His Narnia chronicles written between 1950 and 1956 are probably his most widely read books. His other works include Till We Have Faces in 1956, a retelling of the Cupid and Psyche myth, The Problem of Pain in 1940, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century in 1954 and, notably, his Space Trilogy.


CREED AND MYTH IN LEWIS´ "SPACE TRILOGY".



Background of the Trilogy.

“The idea of other planets exercised upon me,” Lewis said in Surprised by Joy, “a peculiar, heady attraction, which was quite different from any other of my literary interests. The interest, when the fit was on me, was ravenous, like a lust … My own planetary romances have been not so much the gratification of that fierce curiosity as its exorcism.”

Lewis would at times approach subjects in his writings in two alternate, very different ways: one highly scholarly version, and one popular. This is especially evident in the case of the three books comprising the Space Trilogy. The scholarly treatment of the theme popularized in Out of the Silent Planet – the Medieval view of the universe as being not dead and barren but alive – was first put forth in the lectures given in 1928, later edited and published as The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature. The theme of Perelandra – the fall of man – was first treated by Lewis in three lectures on John Milton´s Paradise Lost given in 1941 at University College of North Wales in Bangor. These lectures formed the basis for Preface to Paradise Lost, which was published in 1942, and the following year saw the publication of Perelandra. The basis for That Hideous Strength was three lectures held at Durham University, that were later published as The Abolition of Man. That book is treated separately later in this essay.

Between 1937 and 1944 C.S. Lewis wrote the three novels which have become commonly known as his “Space Trilogy”. These novels which are among his most widely read are usually described as science-fiction novels with mythical and religious connotations. In these books Lewis’ views of life, man, God and the universe are salient. In creating his own myth, Lewis conceived and maintained a metaphor that would carry in fictional form the basic tenets of Christianity, but presenting them from a not overtly religious point of view, without overt references to normal Christian symbols. But in the guise of mythical fantasy is also found a piercing criticism against trends in science and education which Lewis saw surfacing about this time. In the thirties Lewis had become increasingly worried about the notions put forth by prominent scientists and philosophers about the importance of the race and the great collective and the consequent unimportance of the individual.

In England such thoughts were expressed by among others Olaf Stapledon (Last and First Men, 1930) and professor J.B.S. Haldane, a famous psysiologist, biologist and philosopher e.g. in his Possible Worlds, (1927). This view could be described as a proposition that technically advanced races have the right to supercede less advanced ones, because the supreme moral end is the perpetuation of our own species, and that this end is to be pursued at all cost. In 1943 Lewis held a series of lectures on this subject at Durham University, which were later published under the title The Abolition of Man.

Lewis said that although he did not think many scientists held this philosophy as yet, such a point of view was certainly on the way. Lewis feared that the implementing of these ideas, which he called “scientism”, would strip our species of all those things for which we value it – of pity, happiness and freedom, and he wanted to show how dreadful the present tendencies might become if allowed to proceed unchecked. Many people believed as a result that he was attacking science, but Lewis said he was criticising not scientists, but what was rather a kind of political conspiracy that used science as its pretext.13 It was only a few years until his predictions became true in Germany in a most horrible way as scientists and doctors would work hand in hand with the political power to “improve” the human race through inhuman experiments and even genicide of races deemed as low or obsolete.

Lewis chose to use both science-fiction and traditional myths as a framework in his novels, as well as inventing myths of his own as he poses the question: What if there are other inhabited planets and contact with these is indeed possible within not too distant a future? What then will our relationsship to our interplanetary neighbours be? Lewis considered a race indifferent to ethics to be like a cancer in the universe, certain as he was that man would mistreat aliens as he has other races here on earth:

“I look forward with horror to contact with the other inhabited planets, if there are
such. We would only transport to them all of our sin and our acquisitiveness, and
establish a new colonialism.” (God in the Dock, p. 267).

This point of view was of course based on the orthodox Christian belief which Lewis shared: that man´s fall into sin was an historical reality and that unredeemed man is since carrying an “infection”, which he would – without being able to help it – spread to other rational species not infected with this disease. In the first part of the trilogy in particular, the idea is put forth of man being as it were in a “state of quarantine”.

But he was also worried at the prospect of spacetravel from a sentimental and aestethic point of view. The “mythic moon”, for example, as an inspiration for poets and lovers would be taken from us. He felt that “no moonlit night would ever be the same if one, looking up at the pale disc must think, ‘Yes, up there to the left is the Russian area, and over there to the right is the American bit.’” (Christian Reflections, p. 172). His sentiment on the mythical quality of other planets is perhaps best illustrated by his reaction in reference to early rumours of space travel in 1946: “I begin to be afraid that the villains will really contaminate the moon.” (Letters of C.S. Lewis, p. 210).

Because of the rich Biblical symbolism in the trilogy, many have assumed that Lewis, needing a vehicle for his religious views, created the worlds of Malacandra (Mars) and Perelandra (Venus) purely for the didactic purpose. Lewis denied this, explaining that the books comprising the Space Trilogy – as well as the later Narnia books – all began with seing pictures in his head. What inspired him when writing Perelandra, for example, was a mental picture of floating islands, and the rest of the work consisted mainly of creating a world where floating islands could exist.14 At this stage the story about an averted Fall developed. He said: “The story itself should force its moral on you. You find out what the moral is by writing the story.” (Of Other Worlds, p. 88). Lewis was not unique in conceiving stories in this way. J.R.R. Tolkien told his friends of how when he was writing The Lord of the Rings, characters would appear of their own accord, mystifying him as much as anyone before their indispensability to the rest of the story made itself evident.15

In 1928 he had begun a series of lectures on “The Romance of the Rose and its Successors”. A few years after that he began another series on the “Prolegomena to Medieval Poetry”. These lectures formed the core of his last book, The Discarded Image, which largely deals with the Medieval view of the world and the universe. One of the books discussed in the “Prolegomena” lectures was an obscure work by a twelfth-century Platonist, Bernardus Silvestrus. In this work Lewis came across the term Oyarses, which he learned was a corruption of the Greek term Ousiarches (“ruling essence”).

The Latin passage in Silvestrus was translated in 1973 into English as:

“For the Usiarch here was that Genius devoted to the art and office of delineating and giving shape to the forms of things. And so the Usiarch of that sphere which is called in Greek Pantomorphos, and in Latin Omniformis, composes and assigns the forms of all creatures” (‘Microcosmos’, chapter III, p. 96).

These “Oyarses” fired his imagination and were integrated into the books comprising his Space Trilogy as the ruling spirits ordinated by God to rule the living planets comprising the universe; “Deep Heaven”. Lewis says about his depiction of angels:

I was very definitely trying to smash the 19th century female angel. I believe no angel ever appears in Scripture without exciting terror: they always have to begin by saying “Fear not”. […] By the way, none of my Eldila would be anything like so high up the scale as Cherubim and Seraphim. Those orders are engaged wholly in contemplation, not with ruling the lower creatures. Even the Annunciation was done by—if I may so put it!—a “mere archangel.”
[…] Apropos of horrid little fat baby “cherubs”, did I mention that [Hebrew] Kherub is from the same root as Gryphon? That shows what they´re really like! (Letters to an American Lady, p. 13).

OUT OF THE SILENT PLANET.

In 1937 he wrote the first novel in what became his “Space Trilogy”, Out of the Silent Planet, a novel that was labelled as science-fiction, but which also has theological, mythical and philosophical connotations. Here, Lewis lets a brilliant but immoral scientist and his greedy assistant symbolise this acquisitiveness and colonialism that he felt sure would accompany man´s contact with other worlds. The main character, who is a central figure also in the two following parts of the trilogy, is Elwin Ransom, a middle-aged philologist and fellow of Cambridge College. Like Lewis himself, he is a bachelor, an avid swimmer and walker, a sedentary scholar of languages, an antivivisectionist, a Christian and has bad eyes and a war wound. But Lewis said Ransom was to some extent a fancy portrait of a man he knew, but not of him.16 Because he is a philologist, many believe him to be based, in part, on J.R.R. Tolkien.

Synopsis of Out of the Silent Planet.

Ransom, who is on a walking tour seeks lodging for the night. He stumbles upon a cottage where a woman is frantically searching for her son, who does chores at a nearby laboratory. Ransom agrees to seek the boy out and send him home. At the laboratory, he encounters physicist Edward Weston and his assistant, Richard Devine, who are preparing for a voyage to Malacandra (Mars). It turns out that Ransom and Devine are old aquaintances, but decidedly not friends, from school days. Weston’s goal is for mankind to spread to other planets when earth is no longer fit for human life, superceding any other civilisation existent there. Devine´s sole interest is to acquire gold, which is plentiful on Malacandra. Four years ago they had visited the planet and were told by its ruling “angel”, to bring back a man if they wanted Malacandrian gold.

Ransom is drugged and kidnapped and brought onto the spaceship. Though a prisoner, Ransom experiences a joyous journey through space, finding it not cold and lifeless, but somehow full of life and radiant with intense light. He overhears his captors speaking of how he is to be turned over to the Malacandrian creatures and, expecting the fate of a human sacrifice to some bug-eyed monsters, he resolves to escape as soon as they arrive. Just as he was surprised at finding space different from what he had always imagined, he is amazed at finding Malacandra a strangely bright and still world with an atmosphere not unlike that of ours, and a pale blue sky. He suceeds in escaping and roams about, fearful of what kind of unearthly creatures he will encounter. When he encounters them, he finds that they certainly are unearthly in their outward appearence (one species seallike, a second elongated and spindly, and a third froglike), but that these species are rational and intelligent. He finds that they are not at all inhuman, simply different.

Being a philologist, Ransom in time learns how to communicate with them. Attempting to warn them of the true intentions of Weston and Devine, he finds that the Malacandrians have no understanding of the concept “evil,” and there is no word in any Malacandrian language corresponding with “evil;” their closest equivalent being “bent” as opposed to “straight.” Yet the inhabitants know danger in the form of water beasts called “hneraki,” who periodically attack those who travel across the water. Ransom is in time brought to the island which is the dwellingplace of the Oyarsa; the bodyless angel or ruling spirit of the planet. From the Oyarsa he learns the history of Malacandra, of Deep Heaven (which is the universe), and he learns of Earth’s sad state. It dawns on him that the universe is alive, with planets inhabited by beings in joyful communion with each other and with their creator Maleldil (God) through a ruling angel on each planet. It is only earth that is outside Heaven and silent because its own Oyarsa became bent.

He is also told that at one time Maleldil himself subjected himself to terrible things, going down to the silent planet to wrestle with the bent Oyarsa for the liberation of that planet, and that since that time until the final liberation, channels have been opened making communication possible between Earth and Deep Heaven. It dawns on Ransom that the other worlds including Malacandra are unfallen; nothing happened here like the fall of Man in Eden. The reason for asking Weston and Devine to bring a man from Earth was simply the wish to learn more about Thulcandra, the silent planet.

Weston and Devine are finally also brought before the Oyarsa. Weston assumes that because the creatures of Malacandra are outwardly different from men and show no signs of a high technological culture, they are automatically inferior and it is the right of mankind to expand our limits through interplanetary colonisation at their expense. Because Weston’s goal is to further the human race with no regard to the lives of individuals, himself included, the Oyarsa calls him “bent.” Devine, whose only interest in the new world is its gold, is referred to as “broken.” Ransom chooses to return with the two other men to earth, agreeing to carefully watch Weston and Devine for other evils they might devise. They just barely make the passage back to Earth. Nine months after he left, Ransom has returned safely but greatly changed. His entire notion of Earth and the Universe has been altered. He relates his story to Lewis, who puts his story in fictional form.

Medieval Perspectives and Lewis´ Myth of Deep Heaven.

Although Lewis creates his own “myth,” much of his material is rooted in ancient medieval views of Earth and the Universe. According to these, Earth stood motionless at the centre, surrounded by seven spheres, each with one planet. Beyond all this was the infinite “empyrean,” or “true” Heaven. Lewis’ idea in the trilogy that the Bent Archon of Earth together with his evil eldils was bound in the air of Earth since his rebellion and confined to the region below the moon, also draws on a medieval concept. From Aristotle came the view expressed in the trilogy of the moon’s orbit as a boundary between two regions of the Universe: Everything below the Moon was irregular and perishable, everything above the Moon was perfect and eternal. 17 But Lewis turns the Ptolemaic model with earth at the center around, putting the bent and silent Earth at the very outer edge of a universe teeming with light and life, Deep Heaven:

“He had read of ‘Space’ ... the black, cold vacuity, the utter deadness, which was
supposed to separate the worlds. He had not known how much it affected him until
now -- now that the very name 'Space' seemed a blasphemous libel for this
empyrean ocean of radiance in which they swam.” (Out of the Silent Planet, p. 35).

Since the fall of man, “the shadow of one dark wing is all over Tellus,” (p. 167)
and no messages come from it. Concerning the creatures he describes in all the other worlds in relation to man, Lewis writes:

“In modern, that is, in evolutionary thought man stands at the top of a stair whose
foot is lost in obscurity, in this, he stands at the bottom of a stair whose top is invi-
sible with warmth and light.” (The Discarded Image, pp. 74-5).

In Out of the Silent Planet, Lewis thus uses the imagery of a universal order far removed from the one known, and of other planets with different civilisations in relation to man, to attack the idea of the automatic right of technically advanced races to supercede other races, losing human values in the process. The Biblical “myth” of Satan’s siege of earth is also central. At the end of the book there is an invented written correspondence between Ransom and Lewis, where they agree that the best way to carry their message across is probably in the form of fiction. Ransom says that the readers will easily identify Weston, and further: “If we could even effect in one per cent of our readers a changeover from the conception of Space to the conception of Heaven, we should have made a beginning.” (Out of the Silent Planet, p. 180).

Lewis’ View on Science Fiction.

Although both Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra are set on other planets, none of the books in the “Space Trilogy,” can be classified solely as “science fiction.” Lewis himself classified science-fiction into several types, truly enjoying only one of which.18 First and worst is the type that uses the future or other-worldly environments merely as a backdrop for a story that could just as well have taken place anywhere. The second type is interested in undiscovered techniques as real possibilities (e.g. Jules Verne´s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea). The third is speculative, posing the question what such and such a planet or experience is like? Such a work is H.G. Well´s The First Men in the Moon. The fourth type of science fiction, says Lewis, deals with the future; for example the ultimate destiny of our species, and here he found the greatest influence on his own books. Of this type were also Stapledon´s and Haldane´s works, which both concerned Man’s possible migration to, and colonization of, other planets in the future because of his “survival instinct.” Many believe that Haldane in particular was represented by Weston in the books.

Lewis thought that mainstream science-fiction literature contained too much science and too little fiction. He was in fact totally uninterested in the purely technical side of his own stories, and tried to introduce just enough “fact” to make the stories somewhat plausible and to encourage his readers to get involved in the essential parts of the stories. The propelling of the spaceship in Out of the Silent Planet by some lesser known properties of solar radiation was, he confessed, “pure mumbo jumbo,”19 and his descriptions of vegetation and life on Mars and Venus were deliberately “out of this world” in more senses than one. Lewis believed science-fiction important as a literary style as it can deal with key issues, such as human destiny, far more seriously and effectively than “realistic fiction” can because it allows you to speculate and in painting pictures of human destiny you are not bound to the present or even to this world. 20

Critics on Out of the Silent Planet.

In a letter to a lady who wrote to commend him on Out of the Silent Planet, Lewis wrote:

“You will be both grieved and amused to hear that out of about 60 reviews only two showed any knowledge that my idea of the fall of the Bent One was anything but an invention of my own. But if there only was someone with a richer talent and more leisure I think that this great ignorance might be a help to the evangelisation of England; any amount of theology can now be smuggled into people’s minds under cover of romance without their knowing it.”

Horace Reynolds, remarked in The New York Times Book Review (3 October 1943), p. 16: “Everyone says a new world is just around the corner, but everyone is pretty vague about just what it is to be. The plain truth of the matter is that man has to imagine this new order before it can be realized. Mr. Lewis’ romance is one step forward in the preliminary dreaming, the discovery of the Mystery.”

One of the few reviewers who grasped Lewis’ theme was the Anglican divine, E.L. Mascall, who in Theology (April 1939), p. 304, said: “This is an altogether satisfactory story, in which fiction and theology are so skilfully blended that the non-Christian will not realize that he is being instructed until it is too late. It is excellent propaganda and first-rate entertainment.”

The reviewer for The Times Literary Supplement (1 October 1938), p. 625, thought it much inferior to H.G. Wells and wrote: “Alas! And alas! That… a capable writer with an excellent basic notion, did not attend longer upon and learn more from his evident teacher … it lacks too much of Mr Wells’special gift of dramatic sharpening, and above all of running characterization, otherworldly exposition and vivid incident in triple harness.”

J R R Tolkien´s view of the book is shown in a letter to his publisher:
“I read the story in the original MS and was so enthralled that I could do nothing
else until I had finished it. My first criticism was simply that it was too short. I still
think that criticism holds, for both practical and artistic reasons. Other criticisms,
concerning narrative style ... have since been corrected to my satisfaction.”
(The Inklings, p. 66).

He concluded that he would have bought this story at almost any price if he had found it in print. Tolkiens´s sterling recommendation notwithstanding, two publishers turned the book down before it was published by a third, but many people were soon echoing Tolkien’s enthusiasm for it. Lewis even got letters asking if the book was true.

Charles Moorman (Arthurian Triptych, 1960) notes the problem of diction in trying to carry across in fictional form the basic tenets of Christianity without reference to normal Christian symbols:

“The term ‘Christianity’ or even a strict Martian equivalent, would have no meaning
to Martians who have never had need of a Redeemer. ... For example, how can he
possibly account for the presence of evil on Mars where there has been no fall?” (Arthurian Triptych, p. 108).

Moorman answers this question himself, saying that Lewis´ treatment of this problem on the one hand corresponds to orthodox thinking on the problem of evil, but is on the other hand presented from a radically different point of view. When Ransom asked why Maleldil created the ‘hnakra’ (dangerous water beasts), a ‘hross’ (inhabitant of Mars) answers that: “the forest would not be so bright, nor the water so warm, nor love so sweet, if there were no danger in the lakes.” (Out of the Silent Planet, p 87). Moorman deems it as a perhaps too orthodox, ready-made answer to the problem of the existance of evil.

Humphrey Carpenter’s (The Inklings, 1978) main criticism of Out of the Silent Planet is that he thinks the serious themes come dangerously near to being lost in farce when Weston and Devine behave like “a cartoon-strip caricature of the Englishmen among the natives in their encounter with the Oyarsa of Malacandra.” (p 220). He is referring to the part of the book where Weston and Devine are brought before the Oyarsa of Malacandra, mistaking the un-human appearence of the inhabitants for primitiveness, and trying to appease them as they would “primitive” natives on earth:

“To Ransom’s intense discomfort, Weston at this point whipped out of his pocket a
brightly coloured necklace of beads, the undoubted work of Mr Woolworth, and
began dangling it in front of the faces of the guards, turning slowly round and round
and repeating, ‘Pretty, pretty! See! See!’ ... baying of hrossa, piping of pfifltriggi,
booming of sorns burst out and rent the silence of that august place, ... ‘You must
forgive my people,’ said the voice of the Oyarsa---and even it was subtly changed –
‘but they are not roaring at you. They are only laughing.’ “
(Out of the Silent Planet, p.148).

It is undisputed that Lewis uses the absurdity of this situation for comic release. But he is clearly aiming, not at turning the book into farce, but at even further strengthening his case against “scientism” by displaying the absurdity of civilized man’s claim of superiority and right to supercede other cultures on the grounds that they are different from us. This portion was reprised by Lewis in The Magician´s Nephew, where Uncle Andrew, a mean but cowardly sorcerer, is trying to appease the talking beasts in the newly created Narnia by approaching them as dumb and dangerous beasts.



PERELANDRA.

The end of Out of the Silent Planet leaves the way open for a sequel by suggesting that eternal cosmic forces behind Weston would play an important role in the next centuries if not stopped. But in Perelandra the theme of “interplanetary colonialism” is overshadowed by its theological theme. Perelandra certainly arose as a result of Preface to Paradise Lost, which Lewis wrote in 1941. It inspired him to think about the purpose of the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden, and he also became interested in the nature of an unfallen Adam and Eve. He saw Perelandra not as an allegory on this theme, but rather a “supposition.” He says: “Suppose, even now, in some other planet there were a first couple undergoing the same that Adam and Eve underwent here, but succesfully.” (Letters of C.S. Lewis, p. 283). He relates this question to that of man’s inability to help but “infecting” any virgin civilisation with his inherent disease resulting from his fallen nature.

Synopsis of Perelandra.

The story begins as Lewis is asked to Ransom’s house to help him prepare for a new journey into space. Only, this time it is not by means of any man-made vessel. Ransom, who since his journey to Malacandra (Mars) is frequently visited by eldils (angels), is told that Earth’s bent Oyarsa is preparing an attack on the young world Perelandra (Venus), and summoned to go there. He is transported there by Malacandra´s Oyarsa in a sort of suspended animation, in a semi-transparent coffin. Ransom awakens in an iridescent, "deliciously gorgeous" world of warm green ocean swells, golden sky, and floating islands of vegetable matter. He finds that this is a world where one experiences a sense of excessive pleasure with no accompanying guilt, and also that the quite earthlike animals here show no estrangement to men. Unsure of his task here, after a time he encounters one of the two human inhabitants of this young planet, a female who is totally pure and innocent and yet susceptible to evil. He manages to communicate with her in a universal “Solar language” that he learned on Malacandra. Searching for her husband the King, they land on the “Fixed Land,” the only fixed island on the planet. Maledil has forbidden that anyone sleep on the "Fixed Land"; the one command laid down.

Ransom soon finds that Weston, the scientist, has landed on the planet in another spaceship, being the bent Oyarsa´s agent on Perelandra as he and his edils are restricted to Earth. Weston’s role on Venus is really that of the serpent´s in the Garden of Eden; to lure the first humans into disobedience to their Creator and thwarting his plan for the new creation. Weston soon apparently dies, only to rise as an automaton or “Un-man,” a body totally possessed by Earth’s bent Archon, without any need of food or sleep and randomly killling creatures of the new world. He relentlessly speaks to the woman, trying to convince her to break the one command and stay on the fixed island. He argues that it will make her wiser and older, saying that Maleldil wants her to disobey his command in order to become her own person, but obviously cannot tell her that himself. The Un-man is close to succeeding as he relates tales of queens sacrificing their lives for their subjects and posterity, and makes her see herself in that light; as a queen in a tragedy, doing what is required for her seed to be “fully grown”, laying down her own happiness in order for this to succeed.

Ransom, all the time endeavouring to refute the Un-man´s reasoning before the woman, in time finds that he cannot possibly guard her all the time for want of sleep. He is ultimately faced with his true mission on Venus; that this warfare has also a physical side to it, and that he must destroy the Un-man before he has succeeded in his end. The prospect horrifies Ransom, being a sedentary scholar and not by any means a violent man, and he is furthermore convinced that the Un-man must be filled with supernatural strength. His misgivings put aside, he finally engages the Un-man in physical combat and is surprised to find that Weston’s body may be the vessel of supernatural spiritual forces, but has only retained Weston´s human strength. The fight goes on for a length of time until Ransom eventually hurls the Un-man into a vast subterranean fire. Exhausted Ransom sleeps and recuperates, “breast-fed” by Venus in a sort of second infancy. His only bodily wound is a bleeding wound in his heel, inflicted by the Un-man´s bite. Fully rested, Ransom is present as the King and Queen ascend their throne and life truly begins in Perelandra, the newborn world. They now know evil, but not through falling into sin as did Adam and Eve. Ransom is then, his mission fulfilled, transported back to Earth in the same coffin by the eldils.

Biblical Background and Themes in Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra.

Lewis wanted to retell central Biblical themes in symbolical or mythopoeic form, stripping them of stained-glass and Sunday school associations. In his myth, the “Oyarsa of Earth” is a close representation of the Biblical Lucifer. Like Lucifer, this Oyarsa was one of the brightest and greatest and coveted the place of Maledil (God) and rebelled, together with a number of lesser spirits. Like Lucifer, he is together with his followers driven out of the heavens.21 While in the Bible, Lucifer or Satan (greek: adversary) or the Devil (diavolos: greek for slanderer or accuser) is described as “the prince of the power of the air,” (Ephesians 2:2) Lewis’ Oyarsa is confined to Thulcandra (earth) and the region surrounding it. There, in likeness with Lucifer, he brings about the fall of man and consesquently besieges the planet.

To break the siege, Maleldil (like Christ) goes down to wrestle with the bent Oyarsa, defeating him and a channel is opened between man and Maleldil. According to Malacandra´s (Mars) Oyarsa there will in time be a total liberation of Thulcandra and the bent Oyarsa will be destroyed, after which there will be a new start for that planet. This corresponds to the Biblical account of the second coming of Christ. According to this, Christ will return together with an army of angels. When the battle of Armageddon takes place, Satan will be defeated and cast in a pit for a thousand years. Earth will enjoy a millenium of rest and peace, ruled by Christ, and subsequent to this Satan will launch his final revolt and be destroyed, and there will be new heavens and a new earth, with a new start for mankind.22 Lewis’ close correspondence to the Biblical theme seems clear enough, yet he writes in a letter soon after the publication of Out of the Silent Planet:

“You will be both grieved and amused to hear that out of about 60 reviews only 2
showed any knowledge that the fall of the Bent One was anything but an invention
of my own.” (Letters of C.S.Lewis, p. 166).

Ransom as a Christ Symbol in Perelandra.

In Out of the Silent Planet Ransom is more than anything else a recorder; someone whose task it is to bring back to earth the knowledge of “Deep Heaven,” and to sow the seeds of a vastly different view of man´s relationship to other created beings. In Perelandra, the role of Ransom is more central and besides being a recorder he, with all his human imperfection, is partly a representation of Christ. Before his physical combat with the Un-man, Ransom is beleaguered with fears and doubt, much as Christ himself in Gethsemane before his sacrifice according to the Biblical account. He is at this point reminded of Christ´s decision to give himself up to redeem mankind, becoming as it were the “ransom” of mankind when he hears a voice from nowhere say; “My name also is Ransom.” (Perelandra, p. 135). Ransom then realises that if he shirks his horrifying task and the seduction of the new mankind in this young world is allowed to succeed, the maker also of this world will surely once again strip himself of the majesty and glory that is his to redeem this world as well:

“If he were not the ransom, Another would be. Yet nothing was ever repeated. Not
a second crucifixion, perhaps – who knows – not even a second Incarnation... some
act of even more appalling love, some glory of yet deeper humility.”
(Perelandra, p. 135).

The meaning is clear. Ransom has a choice: Either fulfilling his part as Maleldil’s instrument in vanquishing the threat to this newborn world – at whatever cost to himself – or else stepping down, letting the Fall be consummated and letting the creator of all things bear the burden that He already once bore on earth. The idea of Ransom as a Christ-symbol is made even more clear: After the fall has taken place God speaks to the serpent and prophesies: “And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; he shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.” (Genesis 3:15). This is commonly thought to be a prophetic reference to Christ, crushing Satan’s authority over the earth and mankind by being God’s ransom, and the wounds inflicted on him before and during his crucifixion.With Lewis, Ransom in the struggle crushes the Un-man’s head with a hurled stone (Perelandra, p.169), but himself receives a wound in his heel, a wound that is never healed. After the struggle, Ransom, near-dead, wanders long through subterranean caverns deep below the Perelandra’s surface before seeing daylight again and being as it were brought back to life (p. 170). This also corresponds to the Biblical record in the Gospels of Christ spending three days in the underworld, or even Hell, before being brought back to life, his task completed.

The Influence of Milton´s Paradise Lost.

As mentioned, writing about Milton’s Paradise Lost was more than likely a triggering influence for Lewis to write Perelandra, as it gave him occasion to contemplate what an unfallen Adam and Eve would be like and also to explore the purpose of the forbidden fruit. He used some of Milton’s ideas in representing the temptation, but he disliked Milton’s portrayal of Satan and aimed to correct it in Perelandra.23 In Paradise Lost, Lucifer is represented as rather somber and grandiose, so much so that he is seen by many readers as the hero of the poem. In Perelandra, the force that possesses the body of Weston is an imbecile, a nasty child who performs petty obscenities and who converts Weston into an automaton devoid of personality. In Lewis’ view, there is nothing grandiose about Satan:

“Ransom had full opportunity to learn the falsity of the maxim that the Prince of
Darkness is a gentleman. [...] a suave and subtle Mephistopheles with red cloak and
rapier and a feather in his cap, or even a sombre tragic Satan out of Paradise Lost
would have been a welcome release from the thing he was actually doomed to
watch ... like being set to guard an imbecile or a monkey or a very nasty child.”
(Perelandra, p. 117)

A personal Life-force v. the Biblical God

Lewis also addresses the issue of religious Dualism and also seems to anticipate New Age ideas, decades before they became widely circulated. Weston, who in the previous novel is a staunch materialist despising any kind of religious worldview, has now become a sort of Dualist only taking it further, believing in a life-force, even a personal life-force, while rejecting the traditional Christian concept of God and the Devil:

“I became a convinced believer in emergent evolution. All is one. The stuff of mind, the unconsciously purposive dynamism, is present from the very beginning. … Man in himself is nothing. The forward movement of Life – the growing spirituality – is everything. … I worked first for myself; then for science; then for humanity; but now at last for Spirit itself – I might say, borrowing language which will be more familiar to you, the Holy Spirit.”
(Perelandra, p. 82)

But by “the Holy Spirit” Weston means something quite different than Ransom:

“’Look here,’, said Ransom, “one wants to be careful about this sort of thing. There are spirits and spirits, you know. … There is nothing specially fine about simply being a spirit. The Devil is a spirit.’
‘Now your mentioning the Devil is very interesting,’ said Weston. … It is a most interesting thing in popular religion, this tendency to fissiparate, to breed pairs of opposites: heaven and hell, God and Devil. … I should have been disposed, even a few weeks ago, to reject these pairs of doublets as pure mythology. It would have been a profound error. … The doublets are really portraits of Spirit, of cosmic energy – self-portraits indeed’ … ‘Your Devil and your God,’ said Weston, ‘are both pictures of the same Force. … The next step of emergent evolution, beckoning us forward, is God; the transcended stage behind, ejecting us, is the Devil.’”
(Perelandra, p. 83)

The conversation ends with Weston calling “the Force” into himself, apparently dying and then awaking again, no longer a live human being but rather an automaton, possessed by and a vessel for this “Force” that Ransom recognizes as the Devil. Weston then plays the part of the serpent in the garden of Eden, trying to tempt the first woman on Venus to break her obedience to her Maker.