“Any amount of theology can now be smuggled into people’s minds under cover of romance without their knowing it.” C.S. Lewis felt that reviews of Out of the Silent Planet largely seemed to miss the Christian underpinnings of the novel. No doubt emboldened by this, he packed Perelandra as full of Christianity and allusions as he could. In fact, Perelandra has enough Bible verses for a few months of Sunday School, and Lewis seemed to give up on disguising what he was doing at all… He could have only made it more plain by giving us a character list that included things like “Maleldil = Jesus.” But that would have been too far even for Lewis.
One of the purposes of this series has been to unpack some of the Christian theology for those who don’t come from a religious background, so we’re going to dive in to some of the specifically Christian allusions in Perelandra. (This book is packed with allusions of many kinds, including to H.G. Wells, Italian astronomy, Pope, Milton, Dante, etc. And of course Lewis saw all mythology as a sort of precursor to Christian theology, so it’s not surprising that he includes many, many references to Greek myth as well!)
Let’s start with the first direct quote from scripture in the book, as it’s also representative of a major theme of the novel. Ransom tells Lewis he’s headed to Venus to fight in a cosmic war. He laughs at Lewis’s baffled response. “You are feeling the absurdity of it. Dr. Elwin Ransom setting out single-handed to combat powers and principalities.” That’s a reference to Ephesians 6:12, “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.” Ransom and Lewis go on to talk about this: It’s ordinary human beings against powerful spiritual beings. It’s “depraved hyper-somatic beings” wrestling against ordinary British lads.
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Christians often call this “spiritual warfare.” This is a novel partly about demonic possession. We’ll probably do a full article about that. Ransom knows from the beginning that he, an embodied human man, will somehow be participating in a war happening in “the heavens” between creatures who have no bodies as we think of them. (In fact, when we finally see the eldila in a form somewhat accessible to human minds, they are burning wheels or possibly people who shine like white-hot iron, a definite allusion to the appearance of angels in Ezekiel 1.)
Ransom’s name is likewise a reference to a Christian doctrine, the idea that humanity can be “bought back” from evil and brought into God’s kingdom. It’s the name of a major theory of how God saves people (what is called “atonement,” a word which I find hilarious and delightful as it was invented in English specifically to translate the idea that humanity and God could come to be united with one another… i.e. that they could be “at one” with each other. At-one-ment. It’s a delightful neologism and I wish more theological words were so simple.)
In fact, Maleldil/Jesus speaks to Ransom directly, saying that he also is named Ransom. Ransom reflects on the fact that although linguistically his surname has no connection to the origin of the word “ransom” (his surname is from “Ranolf’s son”), still from eternity past Maleldil has planned for his name to resonate in this precise time in this precise place. For Ransom must become a sort of Christ for the (two) people of Perelandra.
This book frequently deals with predestination and freedom, a topic that has been of particular interest in Western Christianity for a number of centuries. Related, there’s also a lot of reflection on how myth works, and why, and what it means for the story of Earth’s fall and the coming of Maleldil as a human being to have another place in the galaxy where the story might go differently.
And yet there are many parts of Perelandra’s story that are the same as humanity’s story. Ransom will, like Christ, become a “ransom for many.” There are echoes between his story and Christ’s. In the story of Adam and Eve and Eden, after the first humans have eaten the forbidden fruit and God doles out the various punishments and curses, God tells the serpent that there will be “enmity” between the serpent and humanity, and then says something that in the Christian tradition is read as a prophecy of the future Christ: “He will crush your head, but you will strike his heel.” (Genesis 3:15)
And so, the story of Ransom and Weston takes on various similarities to the story of Christ and the serpent (many Christians associate the serpent with Satan):
Christ crushes Satan’s head (figuratively) and Ransom crushes Weston’s (literally).
Satan strikes Christ’s heel, and Ransom gets a wound to his heel that never stops bleeding.
Satan and Weston both are thrown into a subterranean lake of fire.
Ransom wanders for a time in the underworld, which appears to be a reference to the theological idea that Christ spent three days after his death in some version of Hell before coming to life again.
There are more (many more): When Ransom kills Weston, he, strangely, ritualizes it, which we will talk about more when we talk about this story as a possession narrative: “ ‘In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost, here goes—I mean Amen,’ said Ransom, and hurled the stone as hard as he could into the Un-man’s face.” A rather strange way to murder someone.
Weston (or, rather, the Un-man) appears not to just know the story of Christ, but to remember it. He quotes Christ’s words from the cross in “perfect Aramaic of the First Century. The Un-man was not quoting; it was remembering.” My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?
There are references in the heraldic descriptions of the landscape, too. There’s a holy gorge, the lake of fire, the crystal water, the lilies (we talked about lilies back in this article about Reepicheep).
And there are a number of Bible verses quoted without reference. Here are a few that stuck out to me:
Lewis says that while Ransom is gone, folks in Britain have “raids and bad news and hopes deferred and all the earth became full of darkness and cruel habitations” as they deal with the war. There are two reference here, Proverbs 13:12 says that “hope deferred makes the heart sick” and Psalm 74:20 says “the dark places of the earth are full of the habitations of cruelty.”
When Ransom sees Weston’s spacecraft entering the atmosphere, the narrator tells us “Something like a shooting star seemed to have streaked across the sky,” a reference to the fall of Satan, described in Luke, perhaps, as lightning falling from heaven, or maybe to Revelation where we see a “great star that fell from Heaven” (note that the name of the star in Revelation is Wormwood… and it falls into the water of the world and poisons it).
Two more and we’ll wrap up.
When Ransom is trying to explain to the Lady about death (Weston says he has come to bring “abundant death,” a disgusting perversion of Christ’s offer of “abundant life”), he tells her that when Maleldil saw death, he wept. That’s a reference to the story of Jesus’s friend Lazarus. He falls ill and dies and when Jesus comes to the tomb he weeps. Of course, Jesus brings Lazarus back to life.
For those familiar even with just the Christmas traditions of Christianity, they may recognize the words of the Lady sounding a great deal like the words of mother Mary: “Only my spirit praises Maleldil who comes down from Deep Heaven into this lowness and will make me to be blessed by all the times that are rolling towards us. It is He who is strong and makes me strong and fills empty worlds with good creatures.”
And there are many more: references to the “morning stars singing together” and Pilate and the Christ who was slain “before the foundations of the world” and “those that conquer” and the Morning Star and on and on.
All of which to say, C.S. Lewis wasn’t hiding what he was talking about. He tells us about as plainly as he can without saying, “Maledil and Jesus are one and the same and I hope you know that.”
I know for a fact I didn’t get them all.
I’m curious about this, though, so please share in the comments: When you first read Perelandra, did all those Christian allusions distract you from the story? Did you notice them or not? Was it a distraction or something you enjoyed?
We’re going to take a short holiday break between this article and the next, so however you celebrate the holidays I hope you and yours are happy, safe, and blessed. See you next year!
Matt Mikalatos is the author of the YA fantasy The Crescent Stone. You can follow him on Twitter or connect on Facebook.
As a non-christian I recognized the overwhelming amount of christologic references but they did not distract me from being able to enjoy this as a story. Can’t say the same thing about Narnia #in-case-you-forgot-since-I mentioned-it-2-paragraphs-back-I-am-jesus (Aslan is not a subtle lion)
Strangely enough, I entirely missed the allegories in the Silent Planet books as well as the Narnia Saga until years later when they were explained. I then thought yeugh! I would never have read them if I had known.
But they were mostly enjoyable. Since then I still enjoy the books and the Christian elements are irrelevant. The literary equivalent of Jar Jar Binks.
It’s been decades (around 4, maybe?) since I read Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra. I don’t remember noticing religious references in the 1st, but even as someone with little religious education or background, I found the allegory in Perelandra so obvious and heavy-handed that it spoiled the story for me. I think I did finish it, but was not a satisfied reader when I reached the end. Of course, after so long, I don’t remember much about either novel at this point — all that’s really stayed with me is the heavy-handedness of it and the depth of my annoyance.
I liked the references because I was old enough to see the difference between novelistic storytelling and the compressed, we-gotta-save-ink style of much of the Bible, and between the plain earthiness of much of (for example) Tolkien (which I had read first, at a very young age) and the whatever-it-was that (for example) John’s Gospel was doing. Perelandra made Christian myth and mysticism tangible for me.
By the time I read Perelandra I had known for many years that Lewis was a proselytizing Christian, but he was (and is) my favorite writer irrespective of that. However, I only read it once, maybe twice, decades ago, and although some of his world-building is lovely, I didn’t really enjoy the story; I found it painful to read because he never got inside the mind of the Lady and she never became a real person to me. He was too busy creating a woman who behaved like his stereotyped, late-Victorian idea of how a woman should be — an ideal but mysterious, motherly, perfect being whose thoughts and actions can’t really be understood because (he thinks) her nature is somehow different from a man’s. So far your discussions of Perelandra have been insightful and I’m learning a lot, but I’ll be much more interested when you get to That Hideous Strength.
Man, I wish I remember what I thought – by then I did know CS Lewis was writing from a Christian perspective so I think I did have the impression he was making some type of allegory but I don’t remember what I really thought about it. I was more devout then than I am now, so I wouldn’t have minded, at any rate.
I remember that the first time I read the trilogy (not till high school or just out) I didn’t recognize any of the allegory and detested the philosophizing. I enjoyed the descriptions of the world of Perelandra, but skipped or skimmed whole sections of the book. Later, after I had come to Christ and had been introduced to the Narnia books and delighted in them, I returned to the Space Trilogy and discovered abundant riches. Now when I reach the paeans section near the end I am uplifted rather than bored.
I genuinely cannot remember when I first read Perelandra, so I don’t actually know if it was at a point when I was identifying as a Christian or not. I was probably in my late teen years, at which point I was more or less an agnostic trying very hard to talk myself into being a Christian. At any rate, I’ve read it as a Christian (during the years when I managed to persuade myself that I did believe, despite all the evidence against) and as an atheist (during the past 30-plus years, after I finally admitted that as much as I would like for there to be a god and a purpose to the universe, the evidence is pretty much all on the other side).
The Christian theology was always abundantly evident to me, as were the Biblical quotations; Lewis certainly wasn’t the least bit subtle about what he was doing and pretty much comes out and says “This is the Genesis account of the temptation and fall, with a different result.” That doesn’t bother me, perhaps because it so open and obvious.
The assumptions about gender as mentioned by #5 above are much more of a stumbling block for me, but that’s Lewis; he was deeply committed to the idea of male authority over females and to a hard-line essentialism about gender roles that permeates most of his work. Either one manages to set one’s objections to that aside, or one chooses not to read his work. Perhaps because I’m a classicist who reads, teaches, and loves ancient Greek and Roman literature, I’ve always been able to enjoy Lewis’s fiction despite my vehement disagreement with all his beliefs about gender, just as I can enjoy Homer or Virgil or Euripides (or 19th-century novelists) even though their ideas about women’s proper roles (and for that matter about slavery, and forms of government, and so on) are in direct opposition to all my own beliefs. In any fictional work, one has to accept the conventions of the world as the author has created it, and there are always things I personally would object to if we were talking about reality and not fiction. For that reason, I have always had a harder time appreciating Lewis’ theological and proselytizing works. Curiously — or perhaps not — that was MORE of a problem for me when I was a Christian, because then I found so much of what he wrote not just wrong but embarrassingly wrong, and yet because he was a “great Christian thinker” it was uncomfortable for me to just snort and say “This is nonsense.” As an atheist, I can reread his theological works and enjoy the thought of debating with him and challenging him on all sorts of points.
As a Jew, I find it interesting how many phrases associated with Jesus come from Jesus directly quoting Jewish scripture— which I recognize Christians interpret as intended from the start to presage Jesus, but which the contemporary Israelites would have nonetheless recognized as Jewish scripture.
“My G-d, my G-d, why have you forsaken me?” is a prime example. It’s the first line of Psalm 22 in which King David doesn’t leave the doubting question lie, but reassures G-d’s everlasting redemption of “all the seed of Israel.”
I know Lewis is using Jesus’ use of the phrase in the story, I just find it interesting that Lewis, who’s so very attuned to the origins and sources of his references used this prime example of a statement of Jesus which means something different in its original source.
@5: I agree that the portrayal of the Lady is in line with a lot of turn-of-the-century pedestal-type rhetoric about women that Lewis fell into too often. However— if one is going to portray someone as an impossibly-pure unknowable almost-angel, at least having them also be from another planet with no concept of ego or society is a more appropriate way to go than dehumanizing actual people in our world. Perelandra succeeds for me partly as an exercise in “How different would the world need to be in order for any of the condescendingly-worshipful stuff men have written about ideal women, and about the ‘noble savage’, to be literally true?”
That may have been largely unintentional, but I do think Lewis approached it with at least a little awareness of his own prejudices, because he makes just about no attempt to show us the male equivalent of this. That is, the Adam character is almost entirely an offscreen cipher, and in terms of the book’s premise we have to assume that he would be a lot like Tinidril, except Lewis wouldn’t be able to write such a person vividly because he can’t quite imagine “what if someone were a man like me, but totally innocent and perfect.” And I’m glad he didn’t, because I there’s no way that would’ve gone well— it would just highlight how much his ideas about the Lady’s weaknesses are based on sexism, like how Weston gets her interested in clothing and vanity, whereas presumably he would’ve appealed to some stereotypically masculine character flaw for the King.
With Tinidril being for the most part the only unfallen humanoid we meet, it’s possible to see her at least some of the time as an ideal for everyone, and her lack of normal human depth as a statement about how much of what we think of as complexity and personality in ourselves is a side effect of our fallen nature, and how our real unique essence is something else we can’t imagine— which, whether one agrees or not, is central to the supernatural idea he’s trying to dramatize. And it’s a common kind of problem for SF/F writers who want to suggest some kind of extreme state of being, like a person having superintelligence or some godlike power: they can’t connect that to anyone’s real experience, so they try to gesture toward how awesome it must be and use allusive language and hope you’ll accept that the character is unknowable on that level. I think Perelandra succeeds at this only intermittently on the positive side, the Weston stuff is much more convincing to me.
#10 I don’t get the point about us not meeting an unfallen male character since we do meet Tor the King, who is articulate and knowledgeable even about concepts which Tinidril struggled (such as abstract views about evil or intellectual development) and who explains to her that he’s going to teach her all about architecture and so forth. That is we see him as her intellectual, educational and hierarchical superior while she’s still being naive and asking basic questions (“What are arches?”) And while we’re given an explanation in narrative for that it’s a profoundly unfair explanation which Lewis then lampshades with “You only have to worry about issues of fairness because you’re a fallen being; in an unfallen world men are superior by nature to women and women do not resent that.”