C. S. Lewis’s Perelandra: Reshaping the Image of the Cosmos

Introduction: The Scope and Vision of This Study

Introduction The Scope and Vision of This Study Judith Wolfe Perelandra is unparalleled among C. S. Lewis’s works in the audacity and grandeurofitsconception.Thiscollectionofessaysbringstogetheraworldclass group of literary, theological, and Lewisian scholars to examine the scope of this conception and work out some of its practical implications. Lewis is a scholar whose originality is indivisible from his commitment to tradition, both Christian and literary; his work is the flower of an imagination inseminated by ancient truth. Of Perelandra, Lewis said that it had all begun with a “mental picture of the floating islands. The whole of the rest of my labours in a sense consisted of building up a world in which floating islands could exist.”1 What kind of world this would be was overdetermined from within a diverse range of sources: literary, religious, historical, and scientific. That it should be Venus was suggested by a curious convergence: the scientific belief, in Lewis’s time, that the surface of the planet Venus was liquid, and the classical imagination of the goddess Venus as Aphrodite Anaduomenê, the goddess rising out of the sea. That this newborn world of Venusian beauty should be a version of the JudeoChristian paradise was suggested by both literary and religious history. In literary terms, the bordered isles were natural versions of the enclosed pleasure gardens of Elizabethan life and literature, themselves conscious imitations of the paradise—literally “enclosed garden”—of Ancient Near Eastern myth. And this inescapably brought with it the religious idea of a new Eden—a world not (yet) fallen into sin. Once all these associations were given shape, “of course the story about an averted fall developed. This – vii – viii introduction is because, as you know, having got your people to this exciting country, something must happen.”2 This throwaway remark already suggests that the spiritual dimension of Lewis’s book accrued to the cosmological one not in a forced or arbitrary way but naturally. In fact, Lewis thought that science fiction in general couldn’t function without a spiritual dimension: “No merely physical strangeness or merely spatial distance will realize that idea of otherness which is what we are always trying to grasp in a story about voyaging through space: you must go into another dimension. To construct plausible and moving ‘other worlds’ you must draw on the only real ‘other world’ we know, that of spirit.”3 In Perelandra, the two are indistinguishable. The Cambridge philologist Elwin Ransom is carried by angelic powers to Venus (or, in the Old Solar tongue, Perelandra), a young planet covered by a golden sea on the surface of which luxuriantly verdant floating islands glide in and out of touch, overlooked by only one mass of mountainous fixed land. A first man and a first woman, majestic but also childlike, spend their days moving freely fromislandtoisland—atoncethe“noblesavages”ofRomanticliteratureand the Adam and Eve of Milton’s Paradise Lost. The convergence of primitive innocence and Edenic majesty is particularly clear in an early verse draft: The floating islands, the flat golden sky At noon, the peacock sunset: tepid waves With the land sliding over them like a skin: The alien Eve, green-bodied, stepping forth To meet my hero from her forest home, Proud, courteous, unafraid; no thought infirm Alters her cheek—4 Unbeknownst to Ransom, however, the astrophysicist Weston has also traveled to Perelandra, in the service of a vision of emergent evolution and space colonization. Allowing himself to be possessed by the blind Force that he believes moves the universe, Weston divests himself of his humanity and becomes a medium of evil, an evil with the monomaniacal aim of tempting the Lady into transgressing the one commandment of her Creator: never to sleep on the Fixed Land. Feeling frustrated and paralyzed by this onslaught, Ransom asks how God can allow this, only to introduction ix realize that he himself has been sent to avert this second fall. First through argument and finally through physical battle, Ransom tries to overcome the tempter, whose death in the subterranean caverns of the Fixed Land releases the new humanity from temptation and ushers in the coronation of the Green Lady and her King as rulers of Perelandra, supplanting the tutelary deity of the sphere, Venus. WhatisremarkableinthisretellingofGenesis2–3isthattheseminalimage of Lewis’s other world—the floating islands of Venus—does not give way (like an incidental backdrop) to the increasingly focal religious story of an averted fall but...