Perelandra {III}

"And now the experiences of the past day and night began to make a direct assault upon his faith... It was all very well to talk of Maledil: but where was Maledil now?... Knowledge remained an abstraction. Mere bigness and loneliness overbore him."

Remember Lewis' definition of faith: "The art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods." Bad days happen. Sometimes several bad days happen in a row. It's easy to forget what we once knew when all we feel is loneliness or depression.

"Say a child's prayer if you can't say a man's."

 "There was, no doubt, a confusion of persons in damnation... they were melted down into their Master, as a lead soldier slips down and loses his shape in the ladle held over the gas ring." 

This is a horrible (and probably accurate) conception of Hell... elsewhere in Mere Christianity and The Screwtape Letters Lewis has expressed his opinion that, "Sameness is to be found most among the most "natural" men, not among those who surrender to Christ. How monotonously alike all the great tyrants and conquerors have been," and that the goal of the devils is to devour and consume humanity. Real personality, real individuality can only be found in Christ.

Ransom's heel injury is a super strong allusion to Genesis 3:15 - when God says to the serpent, "[Christ] shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel."

When Ransom looks up to see an angel with a flaming sword, I think this is an allusion to the cherubim and the flaming sword God placed to keep the way of the Tree of Life in Genesis 3:24.

"One purpose of forbidding the other [island] had been to lead them to this their destined throne."

The Green Lady understanding of the purpose for forbidding the fixed land reminds me of why the children of Israel were commanded to only gather enough manna for one day and no more -

"How could I wish to live there except because it was Fixed? And why should I desire the Fixed except to make sure - to be able on one to command where I should be the next and what should happen to me? It was to reject the wave - to draw my hand out of Maldedil's, to say to Him, 'Not thus, but thus' - to put in our own power what times should roll towards us... as if you gathered fruits together for to-morrow's eating instead of taking what came. That would have been cold love and feeble trust. And out of it how could we ever have climbed back into love and trust again?"

It's about trusting in God to take care of me, not trusting in my own basically non-existant strength.

The Lord of Perelandra tells Ransom,

"We have learned of evil, though not as the Evil One wished us to learn. We have learned better than that, and know it more, for it is waking that understands sleep and not sleep that understands waking. There is an ignorance of evil that comes from being young: there is a darker ignorance that comes from doing it, as men by sleeping lose the knowledge of sleep."

This is like what Lewis said in Mere Christianity - that "only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is... A man who gives in to temptation after five minutes simply does not know what it would have been like an hour later. That is why bad people, in one sense, know very little about badness. They have lived a sheltered life by always giving in. We never find out the strength of the evil impulse inside us until we try to fight it."


Kind of an awesome book :)