Ransom realizes soon after his arrival in Perelandra that he is not on an ordinary adventure: “If a naked man and a wise dragon were indeed the sole inhabitants of this floating paradise, then this also was fitting, for at that moment he had a sensation not of following an adventure but of enacting a myth.” The echoes of Eden, of the story of Jesus, are not a mistake in Ransom’s world, not even a coincidence. He’s in a Passion Play—the medieval drama in which the players tell the story of the life and death and resurrection of the Christ.
It’s not an allegory; Lewis bristled at those who suggested this interpretation.
But the symbolic weight of the world is surely heavy…even, as Lewis himself would suggest, “heraldic,” and there are many moments that are designed to echo something else (the eating of certain fruit that takes on an almost communion-like feeling of holiness, for example), and also moments designed to embody the voice which our mythology echoes. As he writes in Perelandra:
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.
So is it meaningful that Ransom wrestles with the UnMan and crushes his head? Does it matter that Ransom is bitten on the heel and has a wound that weeps blood forever after? Is it important that it takes him three full days before he is “well” again and “ready for adventures.” Of course—all these things have been chosen with care. Lewis has been building to the last few chapters of the book, which is more or less an undisguised lecture on Lewis’s own cosmology.
When Ransom goes to enter the holy mountain there is rich symbolism in the lengthy descriptions of the geography (as, indeed, in all the descriptions of Venus throughout the book). Ransom “looks to see an angel with a flaming sword,” another Eden reference, and at the end of a long valley covered in “rose-red” lilies (a flower associated with death and resurrection; a color associated with life and not typical of lilies in our own world) finds—Ransom is not sure at first, is it an altar, a tomb? No…an empty coffin.
Ransom continues to the end of the book, learning more about the reality of the universe. An extremely interesting sidenote (I debated doing a full article on this, but I think we’ll wait to talk about gender at length when we reach That Hideous Strength or Till We Have Faces) is Ransom’s insights about sex and gender from seeing the two angels, Malacandra and Perelendra.
When the eldila attempt to appear to Ransom in forms approximating human (though thirty feet tall and burning so brightly he can scarcely look at them), he discovers that Malacandra is male and Perelandra is female. Their voices are identical. Their “bodies” lack any sexual characteristics (“either primary or secondary”). Gender, Ransom realizes, is a “more fundamental reality than sex.” He sees feminine and masculine as a binary, true, but one’s sex is merely a “faint and blurred reflection” of gender. Physical differences between the sexes like “reproductive functions, their differences in strength and size, partly exhibit, but partly also confuse and misrepresent, the real polarity.”
He realizes all at once that he’s looking on the incarnation of Earth myths, that Malacandra is warlike Mars, and Perelandra is Venus risen from the sea. They are the solid reality behind the dream, just as gender is a deeper reality behind sex.
Soon all the animals of the planet start arriving to greet the Queen and King. “A regular Noah’s ark” Ransom thinks, and then four singing beasts sing louder than all the others (almost certainly a reference to the four Evangelists in Christian theology, the authors of the gospels).
And then the King and Queen arrive. Ransom had recognized the Green Lady as royalty before, but now he falls at their feet. It’s interesting, Lewis was always interested in hierarchies. It’s one of his medievalisms. He thinks that often enough the problem in the world is that the hierarchies aren’t being correctly observed. A beast must serve humanity, the serf must bow before royalty, and the king bow his knee to God, and so on. Sometimes people see, for instance in this passage, that the Queen is beneath the King in the hierarchy and think that’s a comment on gender roles from Lewis, but I don’t think that’s true. The Queen is far above Ransom—the only other male hnau on the planet—and it’s clear that if Adam and Eve were standing here they would be the Queen and King’s peers, not Ransom’s. Perelandra is Malacandra’s peer, not subservient to him, and on Venus she is Oyarsa, not he. There are roles and authorities and relationships to be considered, and gender is not by itself a determinate…it must be taken into account with a lot of other things. (As you know from previous articles, I’m not saying Lewis wasn’t sexist. He surely was, in a variety of ways. But also, his views were complicated and changed over time, and I don’t think it does us any service to simplify them for the sake of vilifying them…they stand or fall well enough on their own.)
The hierarchy of the universe has changed in a strange and significant and pre-ordained way. The highest being in the universe, the top of the hierarchy, Maleldil, became a hnau. Not even a king, just a lowly commoner. He was killed, and came back to life, and returned to his rightful place. And because he was in the form of a hnau, all hnau have the potential to be holy now—and not simply holy, but directly connected to him in the hierarchy of things. So the King and Queen will no longer have an Oyarsa for their planet (in fact, they’ve never met theirs…Perelandra has been a silent partner in the planet all this time). They will be in direct connection to Maleldil, and all things within the planetary sphere now are under their authority, including even the angels. The King is now Tor-Oyarsa-Perelendri: Tor (which is his proper name) Oyarsa (the planetary ruler—a role that only angels have held, until this point) Perelendri (of Venus).
We quickly learn that Adam and Eve paid a great price to learn the nature of Good and Evil: they ate the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge and disobeyed Maleldil. But when the King and Queen triumphed by refusing to do the same (or rather, to sleep on the fixed islands overnight), Maleldil gave them the knowledge of Good and Evil freely. It had never been the plan to keep anyone in ignorance, but rather to walk them to knowledge without either breaking the hierarchy through disobedience or breaking the relationship with shame. In fact, they are now allowed to stay on the island—what was forbidden is now given with joy.
And what does this mean for humanity, twisted by their own evil? What will happen to them now that there is an unbroken and elevated world so close to our own? Well, Tor says that in years to come, after his own children have filled Perelandra, they will come to Earth. Not to colonize it, but to cleanse it. All evil will be washed away, and Thulcandra will be restored to its proper place in the universe, like Perelandra.
And how is that Ransom came to play such a large role in this? How can it be that this new society cares so much for the “Low Planets” that are broken and tainted with evil? Those questions are foreign to the King and Queen. Maleldil is at the center of all things (not just the center of the universe), which means that:
Each thing was made for Him. He is the centre. Because we are with Him, each of us is at the centre. It is not as in a city of the Darkened World where they say that each must live for all. In His city all things are made for each. When He died in the Wounded World He died not for men, but for each man. If each man had been the only man made, He would have done no less. Each thing, from the single grain of Dust to the strongest eldil, is the end and the final cause of all creation and the mirror in which the beam of His brightness comes to rest and so returns to Him. Blessed be He!
Maleldil’s sacrifice on Earth wasn’t for “humanity” or even for all the hnau, it was for each individual in creation, whether human or eldil or something else. It was for Ransom as much as for me, for Perelandra as much as for you. And Maleldil does all these things because they please him—“All things are by Him and for Him.”
And all of this is Lewis doing exactly what he wanted to do most, crafting an adventure story that was little more than an excuse to talk about the things that he loved most: philosophy and theology, and the true underpinnings of the world. It’s interesting in many ways. This book and The Screwtape Letters both have a lot to do with demonic strategies to bring harm to the hnau of the universe, and fight against Maleldil. But in Screwtape we get only the viewpoint of the demonic. In Perelandra we get the first victory, the resetting of the world to the way it was meant to be. Lewis wrote once to a friend that of all his books, “The one I enjoyed writing least was Screwtape: what I enjoyed most was Perelandra–.”
There is a lot more to say about Perelandra. I think I could write another three or four articles. But our good Queen Tinidril has told us that one should not eat more fruit than one needs, or try to swim to distant waves instead of accepting the waves that come to us. So I think we should reflect on this book for a bit, and then move on to That Hideous Strength.
As I’ve mentioned before, I was a bit nervous coming in to Perelandra, because I loved it so much as a kid, and I worried it might be a different book as an adult. It was. But it’s a sweet book in many ways, and beautiful in a different way as an adult than it was as a child. I’m glad I re-read it, and found that I mostly loved it, just in a different way. It’s still toward the top of my favorite Lewis books.
But how to leave this story behind? Maybe we’ll follow the example of Tor and Tinidril, who packed Ransom into his coffin-shaped spacecraft with fragrant flowers while speaking these words, which I share now with you: “Farewell till we three pass out of the dimensions of time. Speak of us always to Maleldil as we speak always of you. The splendour, the love, and the strength be upon you.”
Matt Mikalatos is the author of the YA fantasy The Crescent Stone. You can follow him on Twitter or connect on Facebook.
Ransom’s vision, in which everything and everyone says “I am the center” and is right, is a wonderful piece of mystical writing.
@OP and mods: they will come to Earth. Not to colonize it, but to cleanse it. All evil will be washed away, and Malacandra will be restored to its proper place in the universe, like Perelandra.
Earth is not Malacandra, that name is Mars. Earth is Thulcandra.
@2: Updated–thanks!
Since this is the last week we’re discussing Perelandra, I’m just going to leave this here:
I recently discovered that there exists an entire 3-Act opera based upon Perelandra, composed by Donald Swann and David Marsh. Perelandra: The Opera was first performed in 1964, but it did not continue long afterward because of the sale of the film rights of its namesake novel a few years after Lewis’s death. (Apparently, the duo asked Lewis in person for permission to compose the opera–there wasn’t any lasting transfer of rights to the IP). Beyond the occasional revival performance, this opera has been forgotten by most.
“Sometimes people see, for instance in this passage, that the Queen is beneath the King in the hierarchy and think that’s a comment on gender roles from Lewis, but I don’t think that’s true.”
I respectfully disagree with you on this. For Lewis, as he says very clearly in Mere Christianity, the authority of male over female is one of the fixed points, something that cannot be changed without stepping outside of the Tao (to use his terminology from The Abolition of Man).
Without question, the Queen is superior to Ransom; royalty are superior to commoners. But for Lewis, within each level, or category, the male is superior to the female. When I taught Greek Mythology to college students, I would discuss the similar pattern there. In Greek thought, ALL gods are superior to ALL humans, so a goddess (e.g., Athena) has authority over a man (e.g., Odysseus). But within the category “gods”, males (gods) are superior to females (goddesses), and within the category “humans”, males (men) are superior to females (women). For Lewis, I think there’s no question that the “authority of husband over wife” is god-given, god-ordained, and unchangeable (I believe “authority of husband over wife” is the terminology he uses in Mere Christianity). So while he may well have believed that sex was only one part, or one reflection, of gender, he also thought that there was a hierarchy built into gender, and that the masculine gender (and sex) had authority over the feminine gender (and sex).
@5 It might be simplest to say that the Greeks considered men, all else being equal, to rank above women. Although all else is frequently unequal. In fact, I find it hard to think of any historical society that thought otherwise, though they might vary a lot in how much importance they put on that ranking.
But if Lewis thought the Tao a guide to an objective morality, it would be hard to ignore such a universal opinion among followers of the Tao.
@4/Jonathan B. The men who wrote that opera tell a terrible/wonderful story of meeting Lewis one morning to discuss it. They walked in the garden and he seemed engaged and interested in their plans. After a decent amount of time he said, “Please excuse me, my wife died last night” and left them for his other business and grief. They were very moved by the experience.
@5/Elizabeth. I don’t know that we’re in major disagreement about Lewis’s point of view here. I’m only saying that gender and sex alone aren’t predictive of one’s place in the hierarchy. A royal woman will always be higher than a common man. And of course Lewis says in the text of Perelandra that Perelandra is higher in hierarchy than Malacandra so long as they’re in her sphere (and presumably vice versa).
#6. “It might be simplest to say that the Greeks considered men, all else being equal, to rank above women.”
I used the terminology “male” and “female” rather than “men” and “women” specifically to make the point that in Greek thought, this hierarchy of male over female applied NOT just on the human level but on the divine level as well.
In my experience, college students (and others) often assume that a culture that worships goddesses as well as gods will give high ranking to women and will have a high level of gender equality. In fact, that is not at all what we find in looking at polytheistic societies with female as well as male deities. When a society assumes that gender is a reality on the cosmic and/or spiritual level, then it becomes almost impossible to argue for changing the hierarchical assumptions about gender in that society.
I’m not sure how this plays out in Perelandra but it is all over That Hideous Strength; when Jane asks Ransom if it makes any difference that she and Mark disagree with the eldila about what marriage means, Ransom is amused and tells her that no, the eldila wouldn’t think that matters AT ALL. In Ransom’s (Lewis’s?) view marriage simply IS a hierarchical relationship, a wife simply IS obligated to obey her husband, and one can no more disagree with that than one can disagree with the law of gravity — it is part of how the universe works. This is, for me, the most repellent aspect of Lewis’s work, although I still am drawn back to reread the space trilogy every few years and still find much to admire in it.
If you want to write more about Perelandra (perhaps at intervals), I wouldn’t consider it excessive.
It’s important to me to say explicitly that Lewis might have believed that stuff about innate hierarchy including but not limited to gender, but I think he was wrong about that. However correct his theology may have been in other ways, and I’m not arguing the God-at-the-center/top part of it, I don’t think insufficient hierarchy is the central human problem. At all.
@9/NancyLebovitz Ha! You are too kind. I think the articles I’d want to write now would be a little too technical for broad enjoyment… like I had thought about doing one about the symbolism of the geography of Perelandra, or one about the inherent heraldic moments throughout, but I’m afraid the group of us who would enjoy that would be rather small. :)
@10/kaci. I agree! Lewis had a fondness for medieval solutions and this is one of them.
Speaking for myself, I think I’d like the one about heraldry, and I might like the one about geography.
@12 I agree – I don’t know much about either topic, but I’m sure I’d enjoy learning!
“And all of this is Lewis doing exactly what he wanted to do most, crafting an adventure story that was little more than an excuse to talk about the things that he loved most: philosophy and theology, and the true underpinnings of the world.” – I find I can’t fault Lewis too much for this becuase I came to the realization recently that a lot of my Star Wars fanfic is basically this, lol (plus a few other self-disovery type things).
I actually find his (heirarchy aside) thoughts on gender/sex to be a bit similar to my own. I had a lot of struggles with my own femininity growing up in part because I was always a bit more ‘masculine’ than most women, as well as just being flat out awkward (which led to a lot of bullying by other girls who are quick to pounce on any weakness). For awhile I had a lot of unconscious internalized misogyny about how I interpreted what it meant to be feminine and definitely was a bit of a ‘not like other girls’ girl.
As I also began to study my own faith more I came to a similar type of thinking – that what we see as sex (as well as gender) are just ‘types’ that are *generally* representing some fundamental quality/truth but not in a perfect/exact way and so there’s a lot of wiggle room. Like, the biological fact of male/female complementarity coming together to create new life represents a truth, even though it doesn’t have to mean something about every specific individual man and woman. Plus most of what we consider gender is just socially determined and in a way that was very helpful for me as it actually helped me embrace being a woman regardless of how I embmodied it (as well as be more accepting of others and not going out of my way to avoid things that I deemed ‘too feminine’).
@14 I also have no objection to theology/philosophy explored through story – it’s one of the easiest ways for me to access those ideas! I’m glad you’ve found Lewis’ gender ideas from Perelandra helpful. I’ve also come across some stuff in the trans community where people found it helpful. It doesn’t work well for me because it seems like Lewis throws a bunch of unrelated things together as feminine and a bunch of other unrelated things together as masculine. Having the larger gametes is biologically female by definition, but there’s no reason why larger gametes should be associated with melody and smaller ones with rhythm, to use one of the polarities from Perelandra. I absolutely agree that a lot of what we associate with gender is culturally determined, but I’m not at all sure that Lewis saw it that way. Biological sex is a polarity that has a lot of power for humans because sexual attraction and reproduction have been deeply important in all cultures, but I don’t know that the polarity “means anything” on a cosmic scale except whatever meaning we choose to invest in it.
@15 – oh yeah, to be clear, I think there are a lot of overly reductive things Lewis attributes to ‘femininity’. And it was actually a completey different set of works I was reading that was helpful to me (it was some Catholic theological work), although this aligns a little with it.
And to be fair I think even in the stuff I like there’s a lot of stuff like ‘receptivity’, nurturing, etc that get attributed to femininity in my spiritual tradition and I’m kind of okay with that as I view them as generalities and core concepts that mean something on some mystical level, not necessarily a truth about individual women. (St. Edith Stein is one of my favorite writers on this topic – and while she also has a few ideas I consider outdated, she talks a lot about the difference between individual women and femininity).
@16, just did a cursory search on Edith Stein – quite a story there! I’d be interested in the Catholic theological work if you remember the name, but no big deal if you don’t.
It was Love and Responsibility/Theology of the Body, which was a whole big thing back in the 00s that got very vogue especially in Catholic young adult or Newman center (college groups) type circles – there are people who have made it an entire area of study. There are all sorts of books written summarizing/distilling it for a more casual audience although I was lucky enough to be part of a group that read through the actual source material over the course of a year. The writings themselves originate from the 60s-80s though.
In a nut shell Karol Wojtyla (before he became Pope JPII) wrote Love and Responsbility as a way to try and elevate the concepts of sex, the body, marriage as this was a time when they were seen as ‘lesser’ vocations. Theology of the Body are basically a series of audiences given over a few years after he became Pope.
There’s a lot of stuff that now will seem a little outdated or reductionist and of course like any evolving thought can continue to be expanded on, but at the time, was kind of groundbreaking and progressive (within a Catholic context at least. But fo rexample, in L&R there’s a chapter about ‘new’ studies of sexual arousal curves and the importance of ensuring the female orgasm). And while a lot of people (especially the more secular commentators) basically reduce it to ‘the sex stuff’ there’s actually a lot of other stuff around just what it means to even have a body, to be a human person, the importance of love vs use, various vocations (including popularizing the idea of singlehood being a valid vocation), etc. And actually a lot of his ideas, I think have their roots in Edith Stein (whom he canonized as he was a big admirer of her, especially as they were both phenomenologists, which is an obscure branch of psychology that I only barely understand despite reading several of her works ;)
Anyway, I’m sure there is tons to be criticized from a modern viewpoint nowadays (especially in viewpoints that divorce biological sex from gender completely as the embodied aspect of humanity is a key feature here), but I did find it very edifying as it was one of those things I encountered at exactly the right time and spoke to a lot of things I had personally been grappling with, and it’s also what I credit with breaking me away from a lot of very (for lack of a better term) Protestant ideas on purity culture, virginity, sex, consent, etc.
But is a line of thought I do wonder how it will continue to evolve as we learn more about sexuality, gender, etc and the science behind it.
ETA: I’ll add that I was purposefully being a bit vague because I was trying not to be too obviously Catholic, and but also because the subject of JPII is one that is kind of a sore spot for me after going through my own period of disillusionment with many things in the American church, but worldwide as well and while I’ve come to terms with a lot of it (even if I’ve shifted a little from where I used to sit), and I still think his writings are brilliant and humane in many ways, he also fucked up big time (maybe not maliciously, but negligently at the least) and it’s kind of a bitter pill to swallow as he was one of the few writers who I always felt a serious kinship with across the page. Some writers you just like their writing or ideas, but – at least for me – there are special few that I feel a special, personal affection for or resonate in a particularly personal way.
Lewis vs Tolkien is a good example of that – I really enjoy a lot of Lewis’s writings, but there’s something about Tolkien (even just his rando musings in his unpublished notes) that seriously endear him to me and are a crucial part of who I am.
#15
You wrote “I absolutely agree that a lot of what we associate with gender is culturally determined, but I’m not at all sure that Lewis saw it that way.”
I think it’s pretty certain that Lewis would vehemently disagree with the idea that gender attributes are culturally determined. In several of his theological works and in That Hideous Strength, in particular, as well as less overtly in the Narnia books, he treats gender (which among humans he sees as absolutely determined by biological sex) as a fixed and unalterable reality; the roles, duties, activities, and even to some extent emotions of men and women are different, in his view, and are immutable because they are determined by the eternal and unalterable categories of gender. In Perelandra, he expands his view of what gender ‘is’ to include the whole list of oppositions/polarities that he sees as lining up with either ‘masculinity’ or ‘femininity’, but he does that (it seems to me) to reify gender even more rigidly; these things are oppositions, are poles, and are baked into reality, so to speak, not just on the biological level but throughout the whole system. For me, this has always been the weirdest aspect of Perelandra, from the first time I read it when I was 17 or 18; it just seems so strange to categorize things such as melody and rhythm as masculine or feminine.
@18 Sounds like something that might be worth reading for me as well. I’m not Catholic, but there’s plenty for me to learn from Catholic writers. I totally understand having very mixed feelings about a writer who’s formed you and yet disappointed you. That’s a large part of why I’m following this blog – I read a good chunk of Lewis as a young teenager, age 13-14. At that age, I was deeply impressionable and tried to integrate stuff from Lewis that as an adult I’ve realized I simply don’t agree with. It’s like discovering that your parents are imperfect.
@19 Yes, absolutely that!
@18/19 – yeah, it’s weird.
To be sure, I kind of take what works for me (because I do love symbolism and archetype) and just kind of discard what doesn’t, and assume it will all work out in the end and it’s a mystery that I’ll likely not understand in this life.
So, I’m okay with the concepts of masculine/feminine as inherent things in a real, spiritual/metaphysical sense, two concepts that represent a kind of complementarity/creation/coming together. And heck, maybe even you can say one thing is X and the other is Y. But when it comes to human persons we just exist on a spectrum that includes all of them, despite our biological sex and which gender we identify with.
I realize that doesn’t work for everybody, but I’m fairly comfortable viewing myself as a woman with some type of inherent ‘femininity’ but who also expresses masculine qualities/traits, and that is a GOOD thing (I think St. Edith Stein also writes about how we as humans should strive to unify the two and learn from each other).
Of course, some of those characterizations ARE i think merely based on stereotypes or inappropriately gendering certain roles/traits/interests. And actually Edith Stein also wrote a bit about the silliness of talking about “women’s professions” because basically if a woman can do a profession it’s a ‘woman’s profession’ and since women are human beings they can basically do any profession.
@21 I have some sense that gender must exist in some way because people have such strong experiences of it, where it matters to them what gender they’re perceived as, whether that matches the gender they were assigned at birth or not. And I can generally say whether a trait, an activity, etc. seems to be coded as masculine or feminine in the culture around me. But I can also immediately take any of those things and imagine someone of the opposite gender embodying it very much. So it’s a fascinating mystery to me what gender really is. For myself, I’m essentially a cis woman and am fine with being perceived that way, and I feel more drawn to women’s experiences in fiction and such, but I don’t feel like my gender in any way determines what I can/should do. Though of course I’m undoubtedly affected by social constructions of gender without being particularly conscious of it. I think I’ve been lucky that I’ve never encountered much in the way of explicit sexism directed at me or criticism on how I performed gender.
#21
You write, “I’m okay with the concepts of masculine/feminine as inherent things in a real, spiritual/metaphysical sense, two concepts that represent a kind of complementarity/creation/coming together.”
This is a fascinating discussion! I am very much on the opposite pole on that. I definitely think that there are NOT any such inherent realities of gender in any spiritual/metaphysical sense at all; I think gender is a cultural extrapolation from sexual dimorphism and therefore ‘exists’ in culture, but as something created by culture. It’s rather analogous to the way that our nationalities exist. Am I an American? Yes, definitely, absolutely, and that has real meaning to me. But it’s not a cosmic or inherent reality; it’s a cultural one. (I don’t think that the fact I’m an atheist affects this, because I had the same opinion about gender when I was a Christian.)
I admit that I have never understood what it means to ‘feel’ female (or male for that matter), so the experiences of trans people are opaque to me. Clearly many people do have an innate sense of ‘feeling’ one gender or the other, and clearly that sometimes is in opposition to their sex as discerned at birth. I grasp that intellectually and (of course) support the right of anyone to live as the gender that feels right to them. But I have no personal sense of what it means to ‘feel’ one gender or the other. I’m female; I’m heterosexual; but neither of those things have ever seemed to me to be core or essential to who I am. And I have never felt even the slightest bit ‘feminine’ (or, again, masculine).
Quick moderator note: While we appreciate the friendly, thoughtful discussion so far, let’s avoid making blanket statements about gender identity and bring the discussion back on-topic to Perelandra/C.S. Lewis. Thanks!
@23 Glad I got to see your comment. Lewis sure had a lot to say in Perelandra about what gender is, and it’s really interesting to look at that through the eyes of present conceptions of gender identity. He definitely would have thought that blanket statements about gender identity could be made that reflected something with universal validity, whereas many of us today aren’t sure about that. It’s been interesting to speculate on what we can and can’t know about the meaning of gender.
On a totally different subject (not that I’m not enjoying this delve into the metaphysics of gender), I’ve always been fascinated by one particular part of Ransom’s underground journey. He’s passing through caves that show obvious signs of workmanship and looks down to see four of the huge crawling bugs dragging a cart with a hooded figure on it. And then, says Lewis, “it appeared to Ransom that there might, if a man could find it, be a way to renew the old Pagan practice of propitiating the local gods of unknown places in such fashion that it was no offence to God Himself but only a prudent and courteous apology for trespass.”
It sounds weird to say this, but one of the biggest stumbling blocks in my own enagement with Christianity is the lack of exactly this kind of thing, at least within the mainstream churches. I’ve long suspected that Nature and Creation are full of all kinds of spiritual beings, some of which are no more hostile to humans than any random person on the street would be. It bothers me that so many Christians insist that there’s no wholesome way to interact with these creatures except to rebuke them in the name of Jesus. I’d feel much more at home in a kind of Christian animism in which worship is reserved for the Trinity but there’s room to venerate (or at least show respect to) the “little-g gods” of the fields and seas and skies.
One of the things that compels me about Lewis’s works is that he seems to yearn for the same thing, but he can’t quite believe it would be “lawful”. He fills his books with mermaids and dryads, but keeps them at a distance – they’re in Narnia, or on Venus, or in the distant past of the Earth, never alive in the world around him. It seems so sad to me that he clearly had such love for the Pagan worldview but believed, as Ransom says to Merlin, that “the soul has gone out of the wood and water.”
Obviously there will be more to say about this when we get to That Hideous Strength, but I’m curious if the other commenters have thoughts about the affection for paganism that runs all through Lewis’s Christianity.
Yes, apologies for derailing – I do think it’s a fascinating topic (and certainly not one I intend to make any blanket statements about as I can only speak to how I experience it and am willing to admit there is more than I can grasp).
Some things are gender neutral, like intellect and sense of humor. For example, I have trouble filling out forms but I can copyedit well and neither is because I’m a woman.
Respecting nature means taking care of it! Including protecting animals, birds, marine life etc., and preserving land and not building over every inch of it.
Lucy Maud Montgomery would’ve understood Lewis’ approach to dryads etc.
@26 This resonates with me so much! I’ve always been attracted to the pagan holidays as well as the Christian ones, the idea of leaving bread and milk out for the Fair Folk, the Japanese idea of the kami of a place, etc. After doing some research, I’ve started practicing druidry and spellwork in addition to my Christianity. (The druids and witches are more or less fine with it, and I’m baptized into the Body of Christ, so they can’t kick me out). I actually had an experience just the other day when I was out for a walk and stopped at a little ephemeral pool in the brush. Nothing at all fancy, really just a big mud puddle maybe 7 or 8 feet across, but I was entranced by its beauty. I felt a lot of things, and I knelt in communion with God the ground of being, and after rising, I also bowed to the tree spirits to recognize their magnificence. My feeling at the time was that idolatry in the pagan sort is nearly impossible for the modern secular mind and that I at least am better served by being open to the way the divine is present all around me. For a fairly compatible Christian view, I suggest The Universal Christ by Richard Rohr, a Catholic Francisan priest who has done a lot to revive the Christian mystic tradition.
@29 Thanks for the suggestion! I’d heard of Richard Rohr but I can’t remember where. I’ll have to check him out.
Your idea that idolatry is impossible for someone in our culture is interesting. Can you elaborate a little on what you mean? Are you saying that in the wake of science and secularism, we can’t really feel true spiritual awe for the powers of nature? Maybe because we can no longer imagine that they’re the ultimate reality – If we can conceive of them existing, it’s always within a larger, more ineffable kind of Being?
It’s interesting that you mention druidry, BTW. One of the major influences on my influences on my thinking about spirituality over the last few years has been the druid author and blogger John Michael Greer. Reading his work is part of what convinced me to give Christianity another shot. From what I understand, it’s not an uncommon experience among his readers. Though it is very surprising for some of them!
You know, that’s funny – while I’m not interested in messing around with spellwork and what not – I’ve always felt a bit of a draw to he natural world as well and I do see a lot of beauty/truth in a lot of those types of traditions (which is maybe why I do feel a kinship to Lewis/Tolkien). One of the common fundamentalist criticisms of Catholcism is how ‘pagan’ our holidays are and I’m like, ‘yeah, so?’. I think it is really interesting how cultures around the world have a need to celebrate these cycles and I do think it represents some truth.
Hallowtide (All Hallow’s Eve/All Saints Day/All Soul’s Day) is my favorite liturgical season if that tells you anything, lol. (Although interestingly I did read an article once that said at least some of the alleged pagan influences are somewhat exaggarated and actually part of a demonization attempt by Protestants. Obviously there were fall harvest festivals and what not but it’s hard to say how much of it looked like what we associate with it now, or if it had the same type of signficance it has now – in some ways the influence has gone both ways.)
@@@@@30 I think that idolatry is still possible – we can still worship power and money, for example, and the mistaken notion that the tree gods should have our complete devotion seems almost innocent in comparison. My understanding of God is the fundamental ground of being, on which all other existence depends. This idea seems to be present in the Abrahamic religions and also in Hinduism, though with somewhat different words and emphases. Because we have so much more understanding of nature as something purely material that we can manipulate, I don’t think we’re as likely to mistake it for the ground of being as the ancients were. (In fact, I think we would do well to recognize the ways in which nature is the source of our being on a more narrow level and how we are not separate!) The flip side of this is that I think we’re less likely to truly believe in a ground of being at all and either see God as just the most powerful thing, but just another thing like us, or just not connect to the spiritual at all or just in a community spirit sort of way. In Vedanta Hinduism, the divine is expressed as eternal being, eternal consciousness, and eternal bliss. For a more western approach, see The Experience of God by David Bentley Hart, which use the same terminology. I will have to check out John Michael Greer.
@@@@@ 31 I often get the “pagan holidays” complaint from atheists and sometimes pagans saying that the Christians stole those holidays in order to push conversion on to the pagans. I think it’s more likely that willing converts didn’t want to give up their traditions and the practical theologians at the time decided that since the traditions weren’t harmful in themselves, it was fine to just do them in the name of Christ.
As an aside on spellwork, I used to get really grumpy when people, particularly non-Christians, would maintain that the Eucharist is “just magic by another name”. Since exploring other traditions, though, I’ve found that I’m perfectly happy flipping the viewpoint – that all magic, at least as I practice it, is sacrament.
@31: Is this the article you read? (The same site also has articles debunking the supposed pagan roots of Easter and Christmas.)
I don’t think it was this exact site, but it was a similar argument (or maybe even just quoted this article). But at any rate, it just seems like the answer is basically we can’t say conclusively one way or the other. It stands to reason that there were some type of fall/harvest festivals but we just don’t know enough to say or trace back any specific traditions to it, and those traditions have other origins as well (although could also have been borrowed).
I mean, ultimtaely, people gonna people, so it doesn’t really surprise me if we find these kinds of common threads or ‘borrowing’.
@30 I started looking into John Michael Greer and was quickly overwhelmed – would you be able to recommend a starting place for his work?
@35 I can try – it depends a little on what you’re looking for! But yeah, he’s an unbelievably prolific writer. One option would be to just check out his blog at ecosophia.net.
Aside from that, if you’re interested in his thoughts on Druidry, The Druidry Handbook or Mystery Teachings From the Living Earth are good starting points. For Golden-Dawn style ritual magic, there’s Circles of Power and Paths of Wisdom. For thoughts on Christianity, there’s The God From the House of Bread, his contribution to an essay collection entitled Jesus Through Pagan Eyes.
What got me interested was his series of posts introducing magic and spirituality to complete novices on his older blog The Well of Galabes (he no longer updates there, but I believe it’s still available). I wasn’t a total noob when I found it, but the lucid way that he lays out the case for taking the spiritual dimension of reality seriously was very helpful to me. There’s some really interesting stuff in the comments section alone.
(Obligatory disclaimer: he’s a political conservative, albeit a moderate one, and I’m not co-signing all of his opinions. It doesn’t come up much in his writings on spirituality, but you’ll definitely notice it on his blog. Also, I haven’t read all of the books I listed above.)
@36 Cool, many thanks! From the little bit of his blog I looked at, I definitely found him to be a person of many opinions!
Thanks to all commenters for a fascinating discussion.
Thanks especially to Elizabeth.
Matt: what a generous and thoughtful series of discussions you prompt!
On the other hand, not surprising that Lewis should endorse a hierarchy with such a comfortable place for him.
My favorite discussions of a New Eve start with Bronte’s Shirley and extend through Pullman’s His Dark Materials books.