C.S. Lewis Goes to Venus

Mr Pearce seems to be making a series out of his looks at C.S. Lewis's "Space Trilogy". I can hardly wait to read the review of "That Hideous Strength"!

From The Imaginative Conservative

By Joseph Pearce

On the most profound level, “Perelandra” deals with the mystery of freedom itself. How can a person with free will choose the good in the presence of seductive evil?

My recent essay, “C.S. Lewis Goes to Mars”, discussed the deep philosophical underpinnings of Lewis’ novel, Out of the Silent Planet, which was the first of his trilogy of spiritual thrillers masquerading as science-fiction. The second book of the trilogy, Perelandra, takes us to Venus.

Lewis began writing it at the end of 1941, three years after the publication of Out of the Silent Planet, explaining in a letter to his friend, Sister Penelope, that it was about an encounter with an unfallen “Eve” in a world untouched by evil. A few weeks later, he was writing to another friend, Arthur Greeves, describing his work on “a sequel to The Silent Planet in which the same man goes to Venus [which] is at the Adam-and-Eve stage: i.e., the first two rational creatures have just appeared and are still innocent”.

The inspiration for the novel appears to have sprung from Lewis’s scholarly work on Milton’s Paradise Lost, specifically his book, A Preface to ‘Paradise Lost’, which he was writing in the months prior to embarking on Perelandra. In the chapter in A Preface entitled “The Fall”, Lewis wondered what would have happened if Adam had not complied with Eve’s fall, joining her in perdition, but instead had “scolded or even chastised” her and then had “interceded with God on her behalf”. It was this “supposal” which set Lewis off on a flight of fancy and his hero, Elwin Ransom, on a flight to Venus (“Perelandra”).

Since, however, Lewis was steeped in the Great Books of western civilization and the Great Conversation that they facilitate, it should come as no surprise that Paradise Lost was only one of many contributing influences with which Lewis’s Muse was working during the writing of Perelandra. This is clear from a letter that Lewis wrote to an American scholar in which he suggests that the influence of Milton on the novel should not be over-stated and that it needed to be seen in relation to the influence of Norse literature, and also the influence of Augustine and Dante. He mentioned the Old Icelandic sagas and Wagner’s Ring: “The Wagner is important; you will also see, if you look, how operatic the whole building up of the climax is in Perelandra.” Lewis’s love of Wagner was a consequence of his love for the thirteenth-century Niebelungenlied, the inspiration for Wagner’s operatic epic, which Lewis had first read as a child in 1911. “Milton I think you possibly over-rate,” Lewis continued: “it is difficult to distinguish him from Dante and St Augustine”. He then stated specifically that the second appearance of Tinidril, the unfallen “Eve” in Perelandra, “owes something to Matilda at the end of Purgatorio”.

One other important influence needs to be noted as a crucial key to unlocking the novel on the theological and psychological level on which it works. This was one of Lewis’s own books, The Screwtape Letters, not yet published when he was writing Perelandra but already written and awaiting publication. In this work, written in the final months of 1940, Lewis had sought to get into the mind of the devil himself as a means of understanding how the devil tempts the minds of mortals.

“Though I had never written anything more easily [than The Screwtape Letters],” Lewis explained, “I never wrote with less enjoyment…. Though it was easy to twist one’s mind into the diabolical attitude, it was not fun, or not for long. The strain produced a sort of spiritual cramp. The world into which I had to project myself while I spoke through Screwtape was all dust, grit, thirst, and itch. Every trace of beauty, freshness and geniality had to be excluded.”

Anyone who has read Perelandra will see obvious parallels between Lewis’s grappling with the mind of Screwtape and his grappling with the mind of the Un-man, the diabolically possessed character of Weston, who serves as the satanic antagonist in the novel. The difference, and it is a crucial difference, is that the action of Perelandra does not take place inside the demonic mind but outside it. We see the psychologically satanic mind from the Christian perspective of Elwin Ransom, the hero who is sent to Perelandra (Venus) to do battle with the devil. His divinely ordained mission is to defend the unfallen maiden of Perelandra from falling as Eve did in our world. Ransom is, therefore, a figure of St. George, who is called to risk his life to save a spotless damsel from defilement by the dragon.

On the most profound level, Perelandra deals with the mystery of freedom itself. How can a person with free will choose the good in the presence of seductive evil? The three principal protagonists, Weston, Ransom and Tinidril, address this question in radically diverse ways, each choosing freely and each experiencing the consequences of his or her choices. Weston, in the acceptance of evil, becomes a servant of evil and, ultimately, following the demonic possession of his body and soul, a slave to evil. Ransom, in the struggle against evil, embraces self-sacrificial suffering on behalf of the good, laying down his life as a manifestation of the “no greater love” which Christ Himself exemplifies. Tinidril remains unfallen, though tempted, due to the power of the natural and supernatural shield of unblemished purity which she possesses but also to the natural and supernatural protection she receives as a gift from Ransom who is the agent of God’s own providential grace. Weston chooses infernally and is damned (paradise lost); Ransom chooses purgatorially and is saved through the embrace of suffering (paradise regained); Tinidril chooses celestially and remains immaculately beyond the reach of evil (paradise retained).

__________

The featured image is a photograph of Venus taken from Mariner 10, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.