-
Frightful Freedom: Perelandra as Imaginative Theodicy
- The Kent State University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
perelandra as imaginative theodicy 133 Frightful Freedom Perelandra as Imaginative Theodicy Bruce R. Johnson In a letter to his old friend Arthur Greeves, dated September 12, 1933, C. S. Lewis responds to a question Arthur had raised about “God and evil.”1 The classic academic dilemma, as Lewis would later summarize it in The Problem of Pain, goes like this: “If God were good, He would wish to make His creatures perfectly happy, and if God were almighty He would be able to do what he wished. But the creatures are not happy. Therefore God lacks either goodness, or power, or both.”2 Yet this was not precisely Arthur’s question. Instead, as Lewis put it, Arthur was focused on “a more personal, practical, and intimate problem” (CL II, 121), namely, whether God sympathizes with the evil inside us, with our evil will. Lewis does a fair job of responding to this, focusing much of his attention on human temptation. But it is not quite enough. In the end, Lewis concludes, “I expect I have said all these things before: if so, I hope they have not wasted a letter. Alas! They are so (comparatively) easy to say: so hard, so all but impossible to go on feeling when the strain comes” (CL II, 125). Lewis offers a similar caveat in his 1940 preface to The Problem of Pain. There he quotes from Walter Hilton’s work, Scale of Perfection: “I feel myself so far from true feeling of that I speak, that I can naught else but cry mercy and desire after it as I may” (PP, vii). Lewis adds, “the only purpose of the book [The Problem of Pain] is to solve the intellectual problem raised by suffering; for the far higher task of teaching fortitude and patience I was never fool enough to suppose myself qualified, nor have I anything to offer my readers except my conviction that when pain – 133 – 134 c. s. lewis’s perelandra is to be borne, a little courage helps more than much knowledge, a little human sympathy more than much courage, and the least tincture of the love of God more than all” (PP, vii–viii). Those three small pieces of advice are actually quite helpful—so much so that Lewis will find a way of dispensing them again in 1941, as he begins to write Perelandra. They are important because there is so much more at stake here than simply an intellectual argument. People suffer. They experience pain. As they do, it is often hard for Christians to hold on to hope in the face of the “more personal, practical, and intimate” problems of evil. Doing so generally takes moving beyond the exclusive arena of rational arguments to the additional arenas of the will, emotions, and mystical experience. Resolving the tensions between faith and painful reality takes courage (what could be called the volitional resolution), or sympathy for the plight of others (the emotional resolution), or the love of God (the mystical resolution). Examples of such responses to pain are numerous and diverse: from the joyful spirituals sung by African American slaves to the mystical poetry written in prison by St. John of the Cross. Each attempts to build a bridge across the intellectual gap where rational explanations for evil become insufficient. Such efforts are not strictly “theodicy” because they move beyond the boundaries of pure intellectual reasoning. Yet they are something. When such movement occurs within a work of fiction, it could be termed imaginative theodicy. Because C. S. Lewis was a master at several different genres of literature , he was able to explore these three themes imaginatively as he shifted from his self-described “amateur theology” to the space “thriller” Perelandra. In that novel, the character of Elwin Ransom grows spiritually as sympathy, courage, and the love of God are stirred up in him. Other theological themes are also present, to be sure. But this is one of the key “takeaways,” one of the practical bits of theological advice, that Lewis was hoping to smuggle past the watchful dragons of modern culture into the lives of his readers. Putting these lessons into a novel has the added advantage of allowing readers to experience vicariously the weight of these three resolutions as they identify with the hero, Ransom, as he works through them. In The Problem of Pain, Lewis states that he is “aiming at an intellectual, not an emotional effect” (PP, 55). In Perelandra, because the genre is...