Narnia and the Fields of Arbol: The Environmental Vision of C. S. Lewis

6. Perelandra: Creation and Conscience

We murder to dissect. —C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves In what belongs to the deeper meanings of nature and her mediation between us and God, the appearances of nature are the truths of nature, far deeper than any scientific discoveries in and concerning them. The show of things is that for which God cares most, for their show is the face of far deeper things than they. . . . It is through their show, not through their analysis, that we enter into their deepest truths. —George MacDonald, in Lewis’s George MacDonald: An Anthology In 1960 a young girl named Meredith wrote to Lewis and asked him which of his books he thought was most “representational.” Lewis replied, “Do you mean simply which do I like the best? Now, the answer w[oul]d be Till We Have Faces and Perelandra.”1 For the last few decades of his life, Lewis considered Perelandra (written in 1941–1942) one of his best works. Most of Perelandra takes place on Venus, which is called Perelandra by its inhabitants. This second book in the Space Trilogy is quite different from the other two novels. Nearly all of its dialogue is among three characters, each of whom is, if not “representational,” at least representative or archetypal. This book, perhaps more than any other of Lewis’s, reads like a Platonic dialogue. In the central chapters of the book there is very little action and much dialogue concerning ethics, metaphysics, Perelandra Chapter 6 Creation and Conscience  182 Perelandra 183 and the best life. At the end of Out of the Silent Planet, Lewis claimed to be “removing the mask,” and revealing directly some of the theological purpose of that book. In Perelandra that mask remains off.2 In Perelandra, more than in the other two novels in the trilogy, issues of practical theology rise to the surface and remain there for close scrutiny. David Downing, in his Planets in Peril, notes, “Lewis commented that he wrote Perelandra for his ‘co-religionists’ . . . —that is, fellow Christians. The theology in the second book of the trilogy is thus not smuggled in but carried in through the front door. Perelandra is the story of ‘Paradise Retained,’ of an Eve who is able to resist the tempter long enough for Ransom to destroy him. In fulfilling his quest, Ransom too learns a great deal about the reality of myth and how ordinary mortals may be called upon to engage in mythic labors.”3 Downing is right: Perelandra lends itself readily to discussions about Lewis’s theology and his views of myth. For that reason, one might think that Perelandra is not perhaps very pertinent to a discussion of Lewis’s ecology. Of course, we do not want to “murder to dissect” Lewis’s writing, nor attempt to make this out to be a more ecologically interested novel than it is. Nevertheless, this apparently abstract and dialogic novel is rich with ecological significance. We encounter Perelandra, if not exactly at the moment of its creation, then at the moment of its creation as an ethically inhabited world. Old Worlds and Deep Ecologies Perhaps Lewis liked this book so much because it was so different from other books he had written. Its distinct style and setting offer a unique perspective on several features of Lewis’s ecological vision. In this chapter we will examine two such features: first, the unique setting of an old world recently populated. This is different from what we saw in The Magician’s Nephew, in which the world was created anew. Perelandra is a world with animal life and even possibly ancient subterranean civilizations , but recently populated with rational creatures on its surface. This allows Lewis to explore a different notion of creation: creation is not merely the making of a physical world, but also the discovery and acceptance within that world, by its inhabitants, of their place within it—which, in fact, is a central question of human ecology. Lewis’s philosophy of nature involves, if not a hierarchy of beings, then at least a continuum of beings, in which there are real rational and ontological 184 Narnia and the Fields of Arbol differences. This entails distinct ethical roles for each kind of being, but two similarities: all rational beings participate in creation by affirming their place in creation, and all beings have natures...