C.S. Lewis Goes to Mars

Out of the Silent Planet, and its sequels, are masterpieces of an attack on "scientism", the treatment of science as a religion, which many "scientists" tend to fall into.

From The Imaginative Conservative

By Joseph Pearce

“Out of the Silent Planet” invites us to see the way that each of the three main characters grasps, or fails to grasp, the radical new perspectives offered by the encounter with alien species in a physically strange place and a metaphysically stranger “space”; ultimately, it invites us to judge the philosophies which inform or deform each man’s understanding of the reality he faces.

There are two things of which I am certain about the moment of my death. The first is that there will be hundreds of books which I’d hoped to read which had remained unread; the second is that there will be many books that I’d hoped to write which had remained unwritten. In the latter category, if I don’t get to write it before the sands of my own personal time slip away, is a book on the adult fiction of C.S. Lewis. I’ve already written a book on Lewis’s children’s fiction, Further Up and Further In: Understanding Narnia, but a companion volume on his fiction for “grown-ups” is one I feel a great desire to write. In the interim, until or unless the time becomes available to delve and dive deeper, I will need to be content with writing brief essays which scratch the thematic surface without plumbing the theological and philosophical depths. It is, therefore, in this light that the following sketch of Lewis’ Out of the Silent Planet should be read.

Out of the Silent Planet, first published in 1938, was Lewis’s second work of fiction, the first being The Pilgrim’s Regress, a quasi-autobiographical formal allegory depicting the protagonist’s path to religious conversion, which had been published five years earlier. Superficially, in the broadest and blandest sense, Out of the Silent Planet could be said to belong to the genre of science fiction. It involves a voyage to Mars and the encounter with strange alien creatures. It was inspired by earlier works of “sci-fi” by H. G. Wells, David Lindsay and Olaf Stapledon, but was very different in spirit. It exposes the fiction that science fiction has anything to do with science. Whereas Wells, Lindsay and Stapledon had used the medium of “science” to smuggle their own philosophical perspectives into their fiction, Lewis used the same medium to counter these perspectives. Specifically, Out of the Silent Planet and the two later novels, Perelandra and That Hideous Strength, highlight the difference between the objectivity of authentic science and the pride and prejudice of scientism, the latter of which is the atheistic presumption that the physical sciences have the power to solve all problems.

The philosophical ideas with which Out of the Silent Planet grapples are encapsulated in the perspectives espoused by the three principal characters, Ransom, Weston and Devine.

Dr. Elwin Ransom, a middle-aged philologist of Cambridge University, is modeled in part on Lewis’s great friend, J.R.R. Tolkien, a middle-aged philologist of Oxford University. Tolkien, who had published The Hobbit a year before the publication of Out of the Silent Planet, wrote that he recognized some of his own ideas “Lewisified” in the characterization of Ransom. As the story unfolds, it is evident that Ransom is the only one of the three humans, newly arrived on Mars, or Malacandra as it is known by its inhabitants, who has any empathy with the three species of creatures which they discover on the planet. He is animated by goodness and truth, pursuing virtue and employing reason, and epitomizing the indissoluble union of sanctity and sanity.

Dr. Weston is a physicist who has allowed his practice of science to be poisoned by his belief in scientism. Beginning with the materialist presumption that the physical is all there is, he spurns all metaphysical realities, such as goodness, truth and beauty, in pursuit of the conquest of the material cosmos. His idolizing of homo superbus, the spirit of the Pride of Man, leads to a prejudiced view of the alien creatures on Mars, which he sees as mere untermenschen, inferior species to be conquered and, if necessary, exterminated.

The third of the three human protagonists, Dick Devine, is a shallow self-serving cynic who sees no higher good than self-gratification. He is motivated by the pursuit of material wealth as the means to the self-empowerment that makes self-gratification possible. He is devoid of any grasp of the humanities and the great conversation that has animated human history and culture and is therefore divorced from humanity itself. He is nothing but himself and the narcissistic idolization of himself. He is the epitome of the cynic, as defined by Oscar Wilde, who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing; he is the hollow man satirized in the poetry of T. S. Eliot and the fiction of Evelyn Waugh; he is one of the men without chests whom Lewis would himself condemn in The Abolition of Man.

Much more could be said about this wonderful novel but its inherent dynamic is to be found in the conflict between these three men and the types of philosophy that they represent. Out of the Silent Planet invites us to see the way that each of the three men grasps, or fails to grasp, the radical new perspectives offered by the encounter with alien species in a physically strange place and a metaphysically stranger “space”; ultimately, it invites us to judge the philosophies which inform or deform each man’s understanding of the reality he faces.

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The featured image, uploaded by Madhav fallusion, is “The red planet Mars.” This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.