Perelandra {II}

"Were all the things which appeared as mythology on earth scattered throughout other worlds as realities?" 

This betrays Lewis' great love of myth, and the fact that myth led him to a belief in Christianity makes this sentence intriguing to me.

Thinking about when Ransom is drenched with "an ice-cold shower bath," that brings to his mind the phrase, "die of a rose in aromatic pain," I think it represents baptism.

"Such was the refreshment that he seemed to himself to have been, till now, but half-awake. When he opened his eyes... all the colours about him seemed richer and the dimness of that world seemed clarified... The golden beast at his side seemed no longer either a danger or a nuisance." 

It's cool to think of baptism in that way.

Ransom christens the trees, just as Adam was charged with naming all the creatures in the Garden of Eden.

Interesting thought:

"This itch to have things over again, as if life were a film that could be unrolled twice or even made to work backwards... was it possibly the root of all evil? No: of course the love of money was called that. But money itself - perhaps one valued it chiefly as a defence against chance, a security for being able to have things over again, a means of arresting the unrolling of the film."

Also interesting:

"The word "human" refers to something more than the bodily form or even to the rational mind. It refers also to that community of blood and experience which unites all men and woman on the Earth."

The Green Lady does not know the meaning of "peace" because she does not know anything else. There must be opposition in all things.

I think it's interesting that Ransom cannot get to the other island through any of his own efforts, though it is only after expending all of his efforts that he is able to make it there. It sort of reminds me of a thought expressed in Mere Christianity - that, "We cannot... discover our failure to keep God's law except by trying our very hardest (and then failing). Unless we really try, whatever we say there will always be at the back of our minds the idea that if we try harder next time we shall succeed in being completely good. Thus, in one sense, the road back to God is a road of moral effort, of trying harder and harder. But in another sense it is not trying that is ever going to bring us home. All this trying leads up to the vital moment at which you turn to God and say, "You must do this. I can't."

"Said Ransom with some hesitation... "Do you know why He came thus to my world?" ... "Yes," said the voice [of the Green Lady]. "I know the reason. But it is not the reason you know. There was more than one reason, and there is one I know and cannot tell to you, and another that you know and cannot tell to me." 

Interesting! It sort of makes me think about how Lewis in Mere Christianity kept stressing that if his ideas didn't work for you, then disregard them. I don't think that is exactly what this passage is saying, but it reminded me of it.

The Green Lady explains disappointment thus:

"One goes into the forest to pick food and already the thought of one fruit rather than another has grown up in one's mind. Then, it may be, one finds a different fruit and not the fruit one thought of. One joy was expected and another is given. But this I had never noticed before - that the very moment of the finding there is in the mind a kind of thrusting back, or setting aside. The picture of the fruit you have not found is still, for a moment, before you. And if you wished - if it were possible to wish - you could keep it there. You could send your soul after the good you had expected, instead of turning it to the good you had got. You could refuse the real good; you could make the real fruit taste insipid by thinking of the other." 

I wonder how often I do this. Am I able "turn from the good expected to the given good," or do I have a heart which does not: which clings to the good it had first thought of and turns the good which is given it into no good.

Says the Green Lady:

"The beasts would not think it hard if I told them to walk on their heads. It would become their delight to walk on their heads. I am His beast, and all His biddings are joys." 

This sort of reminds me of the glory we will have in heaven - as Lewis wrote in The Weight of Glory, "nothing is so obvious in a child... as its great and undisguised pleasure in being praised... And that is enough to raise our thoughts to what may happen when the redeemed soul, beyond all hope and nearly beyond belief, learns at last that she has pleased Him whom she was created to please." It also reminds me that I am that I might have joy, and that all of God's commandments are given to lead me to joy. When I remember this, obedience becomes a delight.

The Green Lady explains the purposes of the {good} eldila {which are basically like angels}:

"There is nothing now between us and Him. They have grown less and we have increased. They received us - us things of the low worlds, who breed and breathe - as weak and small beasts whom their lightest touch could destroy; and their glory was to cherish us and make us older till we were older than they - till they could fall at our feet." 

I wonder if this is my glory..... to make others greater, to help them on their way to eternal glory, to decrease myself until there is nothing between them and God.

"Every joy is beyond all others. The fruit we are eating is always the best fruit of all." / The Green Lady.

The fallen eldil {Satan}, is described as having clung too long to the old good instead of taking the good that came. The old good has ceased to be good at all... and still he clings. More incentive for me to watch that I am not clinging too long to the good expected at the expense of the good that comes.

Ransom's enemy, Weston, seems to be espousing the sort of philosophy Lewis argues against in the first part of Mere Christianity. Lewis maintains that there must be both good and evil in the universe, and that evil must be fallen good. In Perelandra, Weston argues that angels could be risen evil, and that good and evil are both parts of the same Force.

Weston is so devious and tricky and skillful at using half-truths as he tempts the Green Lady that even I get confused, and I know he's supposed to represent Satan! Geez! Stupid Satan. Terribly good at what he does. I must always hold to the truth so as to never be deceived. Weston suggests to the Green Lady that she think about things that she is not allowed to do, such as sleeping on the Fixed Land. He also suggests that she could become more like the women of his world, who are like little Maledils {Gods}. "Their minds run ahead of what Maledil has told them. They do not need to wait for Him to tell them what is good, but know it for themselves as He does." He also adds that they are more beautiful and thus more loved by their husbands because of their wisdom. Such trickery. It's difficult for me to pick apart what's true and what isn't. Lewis expressed the mainstream Christian belief in Mere Christianity that wanting to be like God was the sin that led to the Fall of Adam, yet as a Latter-day Saint my beliefs on the Fall are different. So it gets pretty hard to keep everything straight.

"And though there... were a thousand roads by which a man could walk through the world, there was not a single one which did not lead sooner or later either to the Beatific or the Miserific Vision." 

 This sort of reminds me of what he said in The Weight of Glory, that "All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations". All our choices are leading us to one of two eternal consequences. There are no neutral, no inconsequential actions.

This book is sort of confusing for me because of what it says about the Fall... I get confused between what I believe, what Lewis believes, and what Weston / the Un-man / the Devil is espousing. A professor here at BYU once gave what for me has been the best explanation of what seemed like two contradictory commandments given by God to Adam and Eve. How could they both stay in the Garden of Eden and remain in a state of innocence wherein they could have no children, and also obey His commandment to multiply and replenish the earth? This professor gave the example of a parent who wants his child to go to college, but he will allow them to stay at home if they get a job. The child might think that the parent wants them to get a job and go to college, but really the parent would rather they go to college. However, if they wish to remain at home, then they must keep the rules of the house. He explained it much better haha but basically, God wanted Adam and Eve to have children. But, if they wished to remain in the Garden, then they had to keep the rules of the Garden and not partake of the fruit. It made sense to me anyways. It helps me understand. :)

Ransom, on why Maledil {God} commanded the Green Lady not to sleep on the Fixed Land, even though that is not a commandment on other planets:

"I think He made one law of that kind in order that there might be obedience. In all these other matters what you call obeying Him is but doing what seems good in your own eyes also. Is love content with that? You do them, indeed, because they are His will, but not only because they are His will. Where can you taste the joy of obeying unless He bids you do something for which His bidding is the only reason?"

I wonder if I am able to obey God simply for the sake of loving and obeying Him.

When Ransom ponders the state of Weston and the Un-man and how Weston appears to have disappeared from his own body,

"He discovered that any hatred he had once felt for the Professor was dead. He found it natural to pray fervently for his soul..."

 I think this goes along with what Lewis believed about forgiveness. I like to ponder it.

"Up till that moment, whenever he had thought of Hell, he had pictured the lost souls as being still human; now, as the frightful abyss which parts ghosthood from manhood yawned before him, pity was almost swallowed up in horrow - in the unconqerable revulsion of the life within him from positive and self-consuming Death. If the remains of Weston were, at such moments, speaking through the lips of the Un-man, then Weston was not now a man at all. The forces which had begun, perhaps years ago, to eat away his humanity had now completed their work. The intoxicated will which had been slowly poisoning the intelligence and the affection had now at lats poisoned itself and the whole psychic organism had fallen to pieces. Only a ghost was left - an everlasting unrest, a crumbling, a ruin, an odour of decay. "And this," though Ransom, "might be my destination."" 

I think this is a super interesting description of what Hell could be like. Ah. Scary. Ah.

To counteract Weston's temptation of the Green Lady with the nobility of self-sacrifice and self-dedication, Ransom

 "tried to tell her that he'd seen this kind of "unselfishness" in action: to tell her of women making themselves sick with hunger rather than begin the meal before the man of the house returned, though they knew perfectly well that there was nothing he disliked more... What is the good of saying you would do this for the King's sake when you know it is what the King would hate most?" 

This reminds me of the woman in The Great Divorce who was selfish in her unselfishness. She gave and gave and became a martyr, and ultimately she could not abide in Heaven.

"What the Un-man said was always very nearly true. Certainly it must be part of the Divine plan that this happy creature should mature, should become more and more a creature of free choice, should become, in a sense, more distinct from God and her husband in order thereby to be at one with them in a richer fashion... This present temptation, if conquered, would itself be the next, and greatest, step in the same direction: an obedience freer, more reasoned, more conscious than any she had known before. was being put in her power. But for that very reason the fatal false step which, once taken, would thrust her down into the terrible slavery of appetite and hate and economics and government which our race knows so well, could be made to sound so like the true one." 

Satan is so tricky with his lies that are so cleverly disguised and close to the truth! Ah I hate it so much. >:(

""The Enemy is really here, really saying and doing things. Where is Maledil's representative?" [Ransom thought]. The answer which came back to him, out of the silence and the darkness, almost took his breath away. It seemed Blasphemous. "Anyways, what can I do?... I've done all I can..." He tried to persuade himself that he, Ransom, could not possibly be Maledil's representative as the Un-man was the representative of Hell. The suggestion was, he argued, itself diabolical - a temptation to fatuous pride, to megalomania... And then - he wondered how it had escaped him till now - he was forced to perceive that his own coming to Perelandra was at least as much of a marvel as the Enemy's. That miracle on the right side, which he had demanded, had in fact occurred. He himself was the miracle... If the issue lay in Maledil's hands, Ransom and the Lady were those hands."

I love this! We are God's representatives here on Earth. We are His hands. As Mordecai asked Esther, "Who knoweth whether thou art come to the kingdom for such a time as this?" We are the miracle we and others have asked for. Do I act like it?

"Did Maledil want to lose worlds? What was the sense of so arranging things that anything really important should finally and absolutely depend on such a man of straw as himself? And at that moment... men were... awaking... to the preposterous truth that all really depended on their actions; and far away in time Horatius stood on the bridge, and Constantine settled in his mind whether he would or would not embrace the new religion, and Eve herself stood looking upon the forbidden fruit and and the Heaven of Heavens waiting for her decisions... Thus, and not otherwise, the world was made. Either something or nothing must depend on individual choices. And if something, who could set the bounds to it? A stone may determine the course of a river." 

Super awesome. And really makes me think about my choices. Wow. Heavy.

 "The triple distinction of truth and myth and of both from fact was purely terrestrial - was part and parcel of that unhappy division between soul and body which resulted from the Fall. Even on earth the sacraments existed as a permanent reminder that the division was neither wholesome nor final. The Incarnation had been the beginning of its disappearance."

Again, a huge reminder of Lewis' great love of myth and his belief that it is tied to truth and fact.

Just when I was starting to get really confused with this whole allegory thing,  Lewis threw in this little reminder:

"The parallel... between Eden and Perelandra was crude and imperfect. What had happened on Earth, when Maledil was born a man at Bethlehem, had altered the universe for ever. The new world of Perelandra was not a mere repetition of the old world Tellus. Maledil never repeated Himself."

In other words, Perelandra is not meant to be an exact allegory for what happened in the Garden of Eden.

 "You might look on the Earth story as mere preparation for the new worlds of which Perelandra was the first."

This reminded me of what Lewis said in Miracles about miracles of the New Creation.

""It is not for nothing that you are named Ransom," said the Voice... All in a moment of time he perceived that what was, to human philologists, a merely accidental resemblance of two sounds, was in truth no accident. The whole distinction between things accidental and things designed... was purely terrestrial. The pattern is so large that within the little frame of earthly experience there appear pieces of it between which we can see no connection, and other pieces between which we can... Before his Mother had borne him, before his ancestors had been called Ransoms, before ransom had been the name for a payment that delivers, before the world was made, all these things had so stood together in eternity that the very significance of the pattern at this point lay in their coming together in just this fashion." 

This also goes along with that Lewis said in Miracles - that "Each miracle writes for us in small letters something that God has already written, or will write, in letters almost too large to be noticed, across the whole canvas of Nature." It's also just really interesting to think about God setting things in motion at the beginning of eternity.

"There had arisen before him, with perfect certitude, the knowledge "about this time tomorrow you will have done the impossible." ... His fear, his shame, his love, all his arguments, were not altered in the least. The things was neither more of less dreadful than it had been before. The only difference was that he knew - almost as a historical proposition - that it was going to be done. He might beg, weep, or rebel - might curse or adore - sing like a martyr or blaspheme like a devil. It made not the slightest difference. The thing was going to be done. There was going to arrive, in the course of time, a moment at which he would have done it. The future act stood there, fixed and unaltered as if he had already performed it. It was a mere irrelevant detail that it happened to occupy the position we call future instead of that which we call past. The whole struggle was over, and yet there seemed to have been no moment of victory. You might say, if you liked, that the power of choice had been simply set aside and an inflexible destiny substituted for it. On the other hand, you might say, that he had delivered from the rhetoric of his passions and had emerged into unassailable freedom... Predestination and freedom were apparently identical." 

This reminds me of Lewis' thoughts on time that he shares in Mere Christianity. It's also just really interesting to think about.

"He stood for Maledil: but no more than... any man stands for Him in doing any good action. As there was no comparison in person, so there was none in suffering - or only such comparison as may be between a man who burns his finger putting out a spark and a fireman who loses his life in fighting a conflagration because that spark was not put out. He asked no longer "Why me?" It might as well be he as another. It might as well be any other choice as this. The fierce light which he had seen resting on this moment of decision rested in reality on all." 

Intense. True. Fascinating.