Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome to Mythic Mind, where we pursue wisdom
Speaker 1: on the past between primary secondary worlds. I'm doctor Andrew Snyder,
Speaker 1: and I'm glad that you're here.
Speaker 2: Hey there, welcome back. Today.
Speaker 1: We're going to be continuing our Lewis study with Out
Speaker 1: of the Silent Planet. We're gonna talk some more medieval
Speaker 1: cosmology and background, and we're also gonna obviously get into
Speaker 1: the story itself and so be finding brought over you.
Speaker 1: If you've never read this book, Out of the Side
Speaker 1: on the Planet, you've never read the Ransom series. I
Speaker 1: very very strongly recommend it. I feel like it's really
Speaker 1: been gaining a broad scale popularity lately, especially in Lewis
Speaker 1: and in adjacent circles, and for a good reason. And
Speaker 1: there's there's so much, so many important things that are happening.
Speaker 1: Hold on, let me turn down. I'm on a baby
Speaker 1: sound machine duty here.
Speaker 2: Let me turn that down, all right.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's just so much in these books that is
Speaker 1: very applicable to our world today. It's very Lewis just
Speaker 1: a great job of dealing with things that were happening
Speaker 1: in his own age that I've only widened out as
Speaker 1: they've moved downstream to the current era, not that Lewis
Speaker 1: is it was really that long ago, all things considered, right,
Speaker 1: He's a fairly modern writer, but at the same time
Speaker 1: keeps writing about things that are only beginning to develop
Speaker 1: to the extent that they have today. And more of
Speaker 1: that will become evident as we go through this series,
Speaker 1: and so I'll be well beginning to that. But before
Speaker 1: we do so, I do want to give us a
Speaker 1: quick plug for the other Mythic Mind things we have
Speaker 1: gone on here. Over on the Mythic Mind Movies and
Speaker 1: Shows podcast, we're continuing with the Star Wars series. We
Speaker 1: just recently wrapped up the original trilogy with Return of
Speaker 1: the Jedi, So head over to the Mythic Mind Movies
Speaker 1: and Shows podcast to catch upon that and to get
Speaker 1: ready for the prequels that are coming up. And then
Speaker 1: over on Mythic Mind Games, we just began a two
Speaker 1: parter on the Legend of Zelda, and so already you
Speaker 1: can find our kind of broad level conversation about Zelda.
Speaker 1: And then next week, well we'll have the second part
Speaker 1: of that, which is an interview with an expert on
Speaker 1: the subject, and that episode is actually already available on Patreon,
Speaker 1: and so you can check that out right now. Speaking
Speaker 1: of which, if you like what we do in Mythic
Speaker 1: Mind and you like to get all episodes of everything
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Speaker 1: in ad free. And so you can head over to
Speaker 1: patreon dot com slash Mythic Mind. But for now, let's
Speaker 1: go ahead and jump to it with Out of the
Speaker 1: Silent Planet. Hello, and welcome back. As we get ready
Speaker 1: for Out of the Silent Planet. Like I said before,
Speaker 1: my goal in this is not to do a chapter
Speaker 1: by chapter deep dive analysis. We simply don't have the
Speaker 1: time to do that. But what I'm just said going
Speaker 1: to do is I'm going to focus on some key
Speaker 1: developments in the story to really give you this sense
Speaker 1: of theme, the sense of mood, to equip you with
Speaker 1: some tools for getting more out of the story yourself.
Speaker 1: And then I'm particularly going to save some of the
Speaker 1: really deep philosophical conversations in the story for our live meetings,
Speaker 1: and so I don't think I'm skipping over that entirely.
Speaker 1: I do have some plans for that. But before we
Speaker 1: even get to out of the sidelent planet, I want
Speaker 1: to actually do a little bit more build up. I
Speaker 1: cut short a little bit previously when I was going
Speaker 1: over medieval cosmology, kind of the old view of the cosmos,
Speaker 1: and that's because I didn't want to give you too
Speaker 1: much of a map to what Lewis is doing. You know,
Speaker 1: I didn't want for you to say, oh, the Eldala
Speaker 1: fit nicely into this medieval category. Oh, Yarsa fits nicely
Speaker 1: into this category. No, I wanted there to be some
Speaker 1: mystery there. I wanted for you to explore some things
Speaker 1: on your own if you are reading this for the
Speaker 1: first time. But now that you've been through that, I
Speaker 1: do want to give you some of those categories that
Speaker 1: we can talk about what these strange beings are and
Speaker 1: kind of how they fit within the bigger picture. And
Speaker 1: so let's return to medieval cosmol and go a little
Speaker 1: bit deeper there, all right, So, looking again at the
Speaker 1: medieval view of the cosmos, and I really like this
Speaker 1: image here. And so we have the Earth here at
Speaker 1: the center, and then we have the elements, which we'll
Speaker 1: talk about moving out to fire here this reddish orange circle,
Speaker 1: because fire, of course is the lightest, most ethereal of
Speaker 1: the elements. And so once you move past that, well,
Speaker 1: now we get the planetary sphere, starting with the moon
Speaker 1: and then moving outward, and eventually you get to the
Speaker 1: edge here, which then approaches the realm of God, where
Speaker 1: we have God ruling and raining, and we have the
Speaker 1: entire cosmos moving in an ordered spherical motion and imitation
Speaker 1: of the perfect fully actualized goodness of God. And so
Speaker 1: we have a very structured, a very orderly view of
Speaker 1: the cosmos. We really get this sense when you look
Speaker 1: at the medieval philosophers, the medieval theologe, that there is
Speaker 1: this unending goodness, that there is this luminosity in the
Speaker 1: very fibers of being, that existence is fundamentally good and
Speaker 1: ordered and purposeful in reflection of the good order and
Speaker 1: the true purpose, the true end of all things, which
Speaker 1: is God. And so what I wouldn't necessarily call optimism,
Speaker 1: but a philosophy of absolute hope that no matter how
Speaker 1: chaotic things seem to be well this earth, where things
Speaker 1: tend to break down, where things do tend toward corruption,
Speaker 1: where do things do turn to disorder, we have the
Speaker 1: sense that this is just one small little point in
Speaker 1: a much bigger story. And the more that we identify
Speaker 1: with this grand story, this grand spiral, this great dance,
Speaker 1: as C. S. Lewis calls it, in mere Christianity and elsewhere,
Speaker 1: the more that we participate in the joy of the heavens,
Speaker 1: the more that we find that existence itself is deeply
Speaker 1: fundamentally and eternally significant and purposeful. And so there is
Speaker 1: this great joy to be found here. And I think
Speaker 1: in particular of Boethius, who I mentioned before. You know,
Speaker 1: when he is falsely accused, he is imprisoned, he is
Speaker 1: awaiting what would be his death.
Speaker 2: He's able to.
Speaker 1: Find hope and joy and peace and fulfillment simply in
Speaker 1: resting in the perfect order that ultimately comes down from God.
Speaker 1: And so there's a lot of purpose, a lot of
Speaker 1: joy here. I may have mentioned this in one of
Speaker 1: the previous videos, but in Discarded Image CS Lewis talks
Speaker 1: about the difference between a modern and a medieval man
Speaker 1: when they go out and look up at the sky.
Speaker 1: And so maybe you've even experienced this where you go
Speaker 1: out on a starry night and you look up in
Speaker 1: the sky and you feel the sense of maybe dread,
Speaker 1: maybe anxiety, you just feel insignificant. Lewis says that the
Speaker 1: modern man looks up the vastness of space and he
Speaker 1: finds a question mark, He finds a lack of certainty. Well,
Speaker 1: the medieval man looks up at the heavens and he
Speaker 1: doesn't see a question mark. What he sees is an answer.
Speaker 1: He sees an answer to the fundamental questions that we're
Speaker 1: prone to ask. He finds a place for his mind
Speaker 1: to rest in the perfect order and joy that exists
Speaker 1: in the heavens. And so this there are two fundamentally
Speaker 1: different ways of looking at the cosmos. It's not just
Speaker 1: a matter of different science. The science Lewis actually brings
Speaker 1: up is actually secondary to the primary issue. And the
Speaker 1: primary issue is the questions that we're asking, which are
Speaker 1: then connected to what we're seeking. And I guess the
Speaker 1: question is what is it that we're seeking. Are we
Speaker 1: seeking order and purpose that actually exists, or are we
Speaker 1: seeking to project order.
Speaker 2: And purpose on the cosmos.
Speaker 1: And these are two very different ways of seeing the world,
Speaker 1: and this is going to result in two very different
Speaker 1: worlds to be seen. And so let's break down the
Speaker 1: medieval cosmos.
Speaker 2: A little bit more.
Speaker 1: A right, So at the center here you have Earth,
Speaker 1: and if you were to go even deeper here to
Speaker 1: the center of the Earth, well, this is where you
Speaker 1: have Hell, which is of course the furthest away from God,
Speaker 1: the furthest away from the realm of order, the realm
Speaker 1: of being, the realm of existence. And of course, if
Speaker 1: you're familiar with Dante's Inferno, you know, once you get
Speaker 1: to the inner circle of Hell, which would be the
Speaker 1: inner circle of the Inner Circle, well, at this point
Speaker 1: everything is frozen. It's not moving, and that's because we
Speaker 1: are the furthest away from being itself. We're actually starting
Speaker 1: to approach non being. But one thing that's very interesting
Speaker 1: is that in this understanding that God is usually understood
Speaker 1: as being stable because he's fully actualized. If you're fully actualized,
Speaker 1: that means there's nothing else that you can actually do,
Speaker 1: there's nothing else that you can become. And so God
Speaker 1: is unmoving, or perhaps we might want to say his
Speaker 1: actions are eternal, which is another way of saying the
Speaker 1: same thing. And so one hand you have God has
Speaker 1: complete stability, but also so does Hell. And that's because
Speaker 1: the closer you get to evil, the more that you
Speaker 1: recognize evil is a pale invitation. It's a mockery of
Speaker 1: the good. And so just as God is stable, well
Speaker 1: so as Hell, but for very different reasons. But nonetheless,
Speaker 1: so you have held the very center, and then you
Speaker 1: have Earth, which is the heaviest of the elements. On
Speaker 1: top of the Earth, you have water. So now we're
Speaker 1: moving toward the lighter, toward the more ethereal and so
Speaker 1: water is the next sphere of Earth. And then you
Speaker 1: move out a step further, and now you have air,
Speaker 1: and then move out further and now you have fire
Speaker 1: in something like what we might call our atmosphere. But
Speaker 1: this is a pure fire, and because it's so pure
Speaker 1: we don't see it. It's actually transparent. And so this
Speaker 1: is definitely a very Platonic idea here, and so we
Speaker 1: can definitely see Plato's influence here that as we move
Speaker 1: toward the more real, we get less solid, the sense
Speaker 1: that there is this levity toward reality, and so the
Speaker 1: more that we move toward what is more real. Things
Speaker 1: become lighter, more ethereal, less earth bound. The more that
Speaker 1: we move away from the perfect order of the heavens,
Speaker 1: the more more that we move away from the grounded being. Well,
Speaker 1: the more grounded we become, the heavier we become, the
Speaker 1: more prone we are to being dragged down rather than
Speaker 1: rising up toward the heaven. And once we move beyond
Speaker 1: the last of these earthly spheres, well, now we move
Speaker 1: into the planetary spheres, which we're believed to be moved
Speaker 1: along by divine powers. Now, of course, all of these
Speaker 1: powers are going to be named after Roman gods. But
Speaker 1: I mean, of course our medieval Christian philosophers and theologians
Speaker 1: don't believe in the Roman gods at least in the
Speaker 1: same way that the Romans did. But even though the
Speaker 1: names kind of stick, they're really talking about angelic powers,
Speaker 1: angelic intelligences that are responsible for moving the planets in
Speaker 1: their spherical motion. And each of these angelic powers was
Speaker 1: said to have some particular influence, very often connected to
Speaker 1: what the gods stood for in the Roman mythology. Now,
Speaker 1: Lewis points out that this might raise some questions for us, Right,
Speaker 1: what are these medieval Christians doing with Roman gods and
Speaker 1: goddesses in their theology, in their cosmology, and Lewis says
Speaker 1: that as far as he can tell, that really just
Speaker 1: wasn't an issue, which seems to indicate that the Medievals
Speaker 1: believed that, you know, the ancient Pagans had something right,
Speaker 1: even though obviously they were wrong in a very fundamental sense.
Speaker 1: And we'll get more into the intersection of Christian theology
Speaker 1: and Pagan mythology, especially when we get to Perilandra, and
Speaker 1: we can certainly talk about that more if you want
Speaker 1: to now in the Discord chat and in the Life Meeting,
Speaker 1: but he starts to deal with that more directly in Peralandra,
Speaker 1: and so that's where we will start to deal with
Speaker 1: it in these videos. But for now, just know that
Speaker 1: there seem to be some recognition that the ancient Pagans,
Speaker 1: even though they were wrong on a fundamental level, they
Speaker 1: weren't entirely wrong. That they had these certain desires and
Speaker 1: these certain thoughts that in some way at least start
Speaker 1: to approach reality, which are then given proper context within
Speaker 1: the Christian theological framework. And so when we talk about Luna,
Speaker 1: we talk about Mars, we talk about Venus, we're going
Speaker 1: to get some thematic associations with these pagan gods and goddesses,
Speaker 1: but really what we're talking about are Christian angelic intelligences,
Speaker 1: Christian angelic powers that are respond possible for moving the
Speaker 1: spheres and exert some influence on our life down here
Speaker 1: on Earth. However, because the Earth is a fallen planet,
Speaker 1: because things are tend toward corruption down here, well, a
Speaker 1: lot of times these influences will be misappropriated. Even though,
Speaker 1: operating as they are in the perfectly ordered realm of
Speaker 1: the heavens, they are all good, right. All of the
Speaker 1: planetary spheres have good influences. However, these influences can have
Speaker 1: a negative instantiation as they enter into our corrupted atmosphere
Speaker 1: and are picked up by corrupted.
Speaker 2: Men and women.
Speaker 1: Right now, the first planetary influence that we're going to
Speaker 1: talk about is the Moon or Luna, and a lot
Speaker 1: of the information I'm going to go over in this
Speaker 1: section of the video comes from C. S. Lewis's The
Speaker 1: Discarded Image as well as Michael Ward's Planet Narnium. And
Speaker 1: this is a book that I probably should have recommended
Speaker 1: in the last video because even though its called planet
Speaker 1: Narnia and deals a lot with Narnium. A lot of
Speaker 1: the information that he goes over also does relate to
Speaker 1: the Ransom series, and so I will be talking about
Speaker 1: this from time to time, but I'll probably talk about
Speaker 1: it a bit more of extended fashion when we get
Speaker 1: to Narnium. But anyways, so in the medieval model, Luna
Speaker 1: was the planet closest to Earth. In Greek and Roman myth,
Speaker 1: Luna was associated with a number of different named goddesses,
Speaker 1: such as Selene, Artemis, and Cynthia, and these goddesses survived
Speaker 1: into medieval and Renaissance times. Another of Luna's names was Diana,
Speaker 1: who was specifically the goddess of hunting because of course,
Speaker 1: when the moon is bright, well now it's easier to
Speaker 1: hunt at night. And Luna's whiteness and brightness also made
Speaker 1: it natural to associate her with the metal silver, and
Speaker 1: so Luna produces silver in the earth. Now because the
Speaker 1: moon has effects on the tides, the seas, and the rivers,
Speaker 1: she became associated with wateriness. In our related note, she's
Speaker 1: connected with inconstancy and dealt with movement with transitions above lunisphere.
Speaker 1: Everything in the heavens was considered perfect and unchanging, but
Speaker 1: within and beneath lunisphere everything was subject to alteration. And
Speaker 1: so this is where the order of the heavens starts
Speaker 1: to break down. And this kind of makes sense when
Speaker 1: you stop and think about it. You know, the moon
Speaker 1: changes its appearance on a regular basis. However, it changes
Speaker 1: its appearance in an orderly way that we can actually predict.
Speaker 1: You look up at the moon and you know it
Speaker 1: has craters, that it has some apparent physical imperfections. The
Speaker 1: moon has a light side and it has a dark side.
Speaker 1: And more mythologically speaking, I mean the moon has one
Speaker 1: face toward Earth and the other is toward the order
Speaker 1: of the heavens. And so the moon is this transition
Speaker 1: point between order and chaos. For this reason, Luna had
Speaker 1: an influence on wanderers and travelers, those who were given
Speaker 1: over to movement. And she also has an influence over sanity,
Speaker 1: which is why people who lose their wits are called lunatics.
Speaker 1: And in fact, this is also connected to the myths
Speaker 1: of werewolves.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: Because Luna has an influence over sanity, a negative influence
Speaker 1: with Luna can actually lead people, in extreme cases toward
Speaker 1: over identification with their beasteal chaotic natures to the detriment
Speaker 1: of their reason, of their rational souls. And the only
Speaker 1: thing that can stop a werewolf is of course silver.
Speaker 1: And so we get really this beautiful poetic imagery in
Speaker 1: these myths that the only way that Luna can atone
Speaker 1: for her sins is with her tears, that is, with
Speaker 1: the silver that she produces in the Earth. And so
Speaker 1: there are a lot of, you know, stories that are
Speaker 1: connected with the moon and all this really comes down
Speaker 1: to some connection with transition toward life on the borders
Speaker 1: of realities. Luna gets a day of the week, which
Speaker 1: is of course Monday or Moonday. Her metal is silver,
Speaker 1: as I mentioned, and she's associated with envy, with wateriness,
Speaker 1: with confusion, lunacy, boundary between certainty and mutability, and she's
Speaker 1: also a sponsor of hunting and wandering. Right next moving out,
Speaker 1: the second planet closest to Earth in this model is Mercury. Now,
Speaker 1: Mercury was known to be the fastest moving of the planets.
Speaker 1: Partly because of this rapidity, Mercury became thought of as
Speaker 1: a messenger of the gods. He's often depicted with wings
Speaker 1: on his cap and on his heels. He held a
Speaker 1: wand with which he directed pious souls to their happy
Speaker 1: dwellings in the afterlife. And Mercury's lightness and quickness carry
Speaker 1: over to the metal with which he was associated. And
Speaker 1: so if you imagine quicksilver, it's going to roll around
Speaker 1: a dish, dividing into droplets and then recombining very swiftly
Speaker 1: and glitteringly. And so this tendency of Mercury to divide
Speaker 1: into reunite means that he became connected with a variety
Speaker 1: of different things that split up and then I'm back together.
Speaker 1: He is the god of boxers, of thieves, and even
Speaker 1: of crossroads. This again we get this idea of movement
Speaker 1: of transition. In Greek mythology, Mercury is of course called Hermes,
Speaker 1: and as the messenger of the gods, Mercury was also
Speaker 1: thought to have a particular responsibility for speech. He was
Speaker 1: linked with scholarship and with learning. Now his day of
Speaker 1: the week is Wednesday by means of his Norse counterpart Wodin.
Speaker 1: His medal is of course quicksilver, and he is associated
Speaker 1: with swiftness, with heraldry, with skill and speech and learning,
Speaker 1: ability to divide and to recombine and He also is
Speaker 1: connected with the idea of twins, which will come up
Speaker 1: again when we get to the horse and his boy
Speaker 1: much later on. Now, moving out next, we have Venus. Now,
Speaker 1: Venus appears brightly in the sky both a dawn and
Speaker 1: at dusk, and was known as the morning star as
Speaker 1: well as the evening star or Hesperus. Now, mythologically, Hesperus
Speaker 1: was a deity who had a western garden in which
Speaker 1: his daughter the Hesperites guarded a grove of immortality giving
Speaker 1: apple trees. Now we're going to see this imagery come
Speaker 1: up a couple times, obviously in Perlandrum as well as
Speaker 1: in the Magician's Nephew. Now, although Hesperus was conceived of
Speaker 1: as a male god, the special beauty of Venus in
Speaker 1: the sky led it to be thought of chiefly as
Speaker 1: a feminine planet. And of course this is connected to Venus,
Speaker 1: the goddess of amorousness and sexuality, since she presided over
Speaker 1: such qualities. She was also connected with fertility and creativity,
Speaker 1: and thence to motherliness. Now, Homer associated Aphrodite or Venus
Speaker 1: with laughter. She was the goddess of sweetness and love.
Speaker 2: She was considered one.
Speaker 1: Of the most positive influences, and so she was known
Speaker 1: as Fortuna minor. Her day of the week is Friday
Speaker 1: by means of her Norse counterpart Friga. Her metal is copper,
Speaker 1: and she is associated with sweetness, with warmth, with beauty, laughter, motherliness, sexuality, fertility, vitality,
Speaker 1: and creativity. And so she is a life giving influence.
Speaker 1: She is a loving, she is a motherly she is
Speaker 1: a feminine influence. In many ways, she is something like
Speaker 1: the feminine ideal. All right, moving out, Next, we have
Speaker 1: Soul or the sun. Now, Soul was the eye in
Speaker 1: the mind of the whole universe. His fear was the
Speaker 1: heaven of theologians and philosophers, and he produced the noblest metal,
Speaker 1: that is gold, and alchemists were always trying to harness
Speaker 1: his power. Right they were looking for the philosopher's stone
Speaker 1: that would allow them to turn base metal into gold.
Speaker 1: Soul's characteristic influence was to illuminate the human mind, making
Speaker 1: people wise and liberal, obviously not in like a contemporary
Speaker 1: political sense, but the sense of being generous, free and
Speaker 1: opposed to greed and to raw pragmatism or utilitarianism. Soul
Speaker 1: burns a way base considerations of greed and profit, and
Speaker 1: so here we have the influence.
Speaker 2: That gives us gold.
Speaker 1: The influence that gives us wealth is also the influence
Speaker 1: that leads us to hold wealth in an open hand,
Speaker 1: to recognize that the metal, that the material of gold,
Speaker 1: is nothing more than a symbol for that which is
Speaker 1: true wealth.
Speaker 2: And if we look.
Speaker 1: To gold as true wealth, then we are grasping at
Speaker 1: shadows rather than the substance to which the shadows should
Speaker 1: point us. If we're looking directly, and where we need
Speaker 1: to look, it's in the direction of the sun. However,
Speaker 1: the sun itself is nothing that our reason can grasp entirely.
Speaker 1: The sun is not something that we see, is that
Speaker 1: by which we see. And so the more that we're
Speaker 1: able to see not necessarily the sun itself, but we're
Speaker 1: able to see the world illuminated by the sun. Well,
Speaker 1: the more rightly related we are becoming to the influence
Speaker 1: of soul. The Greek equivalent of soul was Apollo. His
Speaker 1: position in the middle of the planetary ranks was held
Speaker 1: to denote a special dignity and honor, like the positioning
Speaker 1: of the heart in the middle of the body, or
Speaker 1: like a king dwelling among his subjects, and of course
Speaker 1: in the Bible, the sun is frequently a metaphor for
Speaker 1: the divine image. And so, you know, we tend to
Speaker 1: say that this old model is geocentric, replacing the Earth
Speaker 1: of the center. But really, you know, if you look
Speaker 1: at the way the heavenly spiritual arrange, it actually does
Speaker 1: have the Sun at the center of the planetary spheres.
Speaker 1: And so I mean, in a manner of speaking, this
Speaker 1: could still be described as heliocentric, which just means something
Speaker 1: a little bit different than that. And so we have
Speaker 1: this idea that reason or wisdom is found at the
Speaker 1: center of the influences, and it is by this reason
Speaker 1: that we're able to see everything else. Now, Sunday is
Speaker 1: obviously given the day Sunday. It's connected with the metal gold,
Speaker 1: as well as with wisdom, liberality, freedom riches, enlightenment, and
Speaker 1: opposition to greed. Next, we have Mars. Now, Mars is
Speaker 1: known as in fortuna minor, and that's because it very
Speaker 1: often had an unfortunate influence. Not that the influence itself
Speaker 1: is bad. Remember, all of these heavenly influences are good. However,
Speaker 1: the influence of Mars is one that is perhaps more
Speaker 1: likely to be misappropriated. Of course, you all probably know
Speaker 1: this that Mars is associated with war. He is the
Speaker 1: martial influence. And this martial influence, taken the wrong way,
Speaker 1: makes warriors into cruel and lawless men. However, taken or right,
Speaker 1: it fortifies noble knights in justifiable conflicts and gives resolved
Speaker 1: to martyr's suffering persecution, making them as strong as iron.
Speaker 1: Mars enables hard but necessary task to be accomplished. And
Speaker 1: I'll say more on this later, but if you've already
Speaker 1: read that hideous strength, consider one of our main characters, Mark,
Speaker 1: most certainly named after Mars. Now, Mars brings discipline, order, rhythm,
Speaker 1: and freedom from anxiety. In an earlier mythological tradition, Mars
Speaker 1: was a vegetation deity associated with the burgeoning of trees,
Speaker 1: woods and forests, and of course, the springtime month of
Speaker 1: March is named after Mars. In this capacity, he was
Speaker 1: known as Mars Sylvanas. And so now that you've read
Speaker 1: Out of the Silent Planet, you know, consider the vegetation,
Speaker 1: all of the trees and the plant life and whatnot
Speaker 1: that we see on the planet of Mars. And this
Speaker 1: is associated with this older tradition where Mars is associated
Speaker 1: with springtime realities. Now Mars is given the day Tuesday
Speaker 1: by means of his Norse equivalent tier. His metal is iron,
Speaker 1: which kind of makes sense given the coloration. He's associated
Speaker 1: with vegetative growth in the month of March, particularly with
Speaker 1: military strength and nightly discipline, as well as with courage
Speaker 1: and orderliness. Or misappropriated, he associated with cruelty and lawlessness.
Speaker 1: All right, moving out, we have Jupiter. Now, Jupiter was
Speaker 1: known as fortuna major. He was seen as potentially the
Speaker 1: best influence. He was the sovereign of the seven heavens.
Speaker 1: His kingliness was that of a king at peace, at leisure.
Speaker 1: He was enthroned. He was serene the jovial influence, which
Speaker 1: another name for Jupiter is Jove, and so the jovial
Speaker 1: influence made people cheerful and festive, yet also tranquil and magnanimous.
Speaker 1: Jupiter was thought to be a temperate planet, positioned as
Speaker 1: he was between the hotness of Mars and the coldness
Speaker 1: of Saturn. In tenth century Arabic manual of Astrology mixed
Speaker 1: Jupiter the ruler of western countries, and for that reason
Speaker 1: he was seen as the patron of the Christians, and
Speaker 1: sometimes he was actually associated with Christ himself, which I
Speaker 1: think this might not be a medieval framework, but I
Speaker 1: think in light of what we know about Jupiter with
Speaker 1: the unending storm here, you know, we even have the
Speaker 1: sense that he has a wounded side, which I think
Speaker 1: adds to the chrystological imagery here in the planet of Jupiter.
Speaker 1: Jupiter represented joy and particularly the pleasure and heart ease
Speaker 1: which come in late spring and early summer when all
Speaker 1: the vestiges of winter have finally vanished, and so he
Speaker 1: is jovial. But this is a joviality that was hard one.
Speaker 1: Jupiter is connected with Thursday by means of thor, with
Speaker 1: the metal tin, and the qualities of kingliness, with festivity
Speaker 1: and festal joy, as well as with tragic splendor and
Speaker 1: summertime tranquility. Now, our last planetary influence is Saturn. Saturn
Speaker 1: was known as in Fortuna major. He was seen as
Speaker 1: the most unfortunate influence in the way that it's usually
Speaker 1: received on Earth. He was the planet whose influence could
Speaker 1: most easily go bad. It was liable to cause sickness,
Speaker 1: old age, ugliness, disaster, melancholy, and death. To write, however,
Speaker 1: this influence might bring about godly sorrow, penitential wisdom, and
Speaker 1: contemplative insight. The mythological character of Father Time is very
Speaker 1: much based on the early pictures of Saturn, who was
Speaker 1: conflated with the Greek titan Chronos, and so Saturn is
Speaker 1: connected with the tendency of things to wear down and
Speaker 1: to fall apart. He's associated with the metal lead because
Speaker 1: of its heaviness and its dull gray color. He is
Speaker 1: of course connected with the day Saturday, and he's associated
Speaker 1: with pestilence, treachery, disaster, and death, or with godly sorrow,
Speaker 1: penitence and deep penitential contemplation. And as you move beyond
Speaker 1: the planetary influences, you then moved to the still autum,
Speaker 1: which is the realm of the fixed, unmoving stars. Go
Speaker 1: out to the outer rim beyond that, and now we
Speaker 1: have the prima mobile.
Speaker 2: This is the.
Speaker 1: First sphere of the physical cosmos. This is the first
Speaker 1: thing that moves, and this outer rim of the cosmos
Speaker 1: moves in imitation of the unmoving goodness, the absolute stability
Speaker 1: and order of God. And so as this first sphere moves,
Speaker 1: it then moves the sphere below it, and all the
Speaker 1: other spheres under it, until finally we get to Earth,
Speaker 1: where this movement starts to lose this order, where things
Speaker 1: start to fall apart. And you know, in the platonic
Speaker 1: in the neoplatonic model, this is because there's something inherently
Speaker 1: corruptible about Earth. But as we move into the Christian
Speaker 1: medieval model, that idea is not entirely gone altogether. However,
Speaker 1: what really makes Earth given over to corruption is the
Speaker 1: fact that we live in a fallen planet, right we
Speaker 1: unlike the planets out here, we have fallen into sin.
Speaker 1: We have turned away from God, we have turned away
Speaker 1: from that which brings order, and in so doing have
Speaker 1: fallen into disorder, have fallen into chaos. And this is
Speaker 1: why we are the silent planet. We do not participate
Speaker 1: in the music of the spheres, in the music produced
Speaker 1: by you know, the intelligences out here that move and
Speaker 1: sing in direction of the glory and goodness of God.
Speaker 1: And so we are a silent planet. We've left that
Speaker 1: angelic choir. Now, next we talk a little bit about angels,
Speaker 1: and we already have a little bit in that we
Speaker 1: know that angels are moving the planetary spheres, but the
Speaker 1: role of angels really played a significant part of the
Speaker 1: medieval understanding of the cosmos. And so the cosmos is
Speaker 1: inhabited by ranks of angels, which are outlined by the
Speaker 1: Neoplatonic early medieval mystic Pseudo Dionysius. Now Pseudodonysia says that
Speaker 1: there are three different hierarchies of angels, and each of
Speaker 1: these hierarchies are inhabited by three different classes of angels.
Speaker 1: And so first we have the upper hierarchy, the seraphim,
Speaker 1: the Cherubim, and thrones, and most of this information is
Speaker 1: going to come from the discarded image. But we find
Speaker 1: that the first hierarchy of angels faces God with nothing between,
Speaker 1: encircling him with their ceaseless dance, and they communicate to
Speaker 1: each other of the beauty and the glory and the
Speaker 1: wisdom of God. Each seraphim passes this knowledge to the
Speaker 1: one next to it, until this transformative knowledge is passed
Speaker 1: to the next order, and then finally to the next hierarchy.
Speaker 1: And so the seraphim are all facing God, but they're
Speaker 1: all communicating what they see to each other, to other angels,
Speaker 1: and then the seraphim in turn passed this knowledge on
Speaker 1: to the Cherubim and the Cherubim in turn passed this
Speaker 1: knowledge on to the thrones. And so we see that
Speaker 1: knowledge begins ultimately with God, and then derivatively it begins
Speaker 1: with the Seraphim, who then passes to each other, and
Speaker 1: then that knowledge passes the way down to the thrones,
Speaker 1: which then passed that knowledge down to the dominations, and
Speaker 1: then to the powers, then to the virtues. And so
Speaker 1: as with this first hierarchy, this second hierarchy faces God
Speaker 1: with back toward us and continues this great dance that
Speaker 1: begins with God's glory. Now it should be noted here
Speaker 1: that we don't see God doing a great deal. And
Speaker 1: I've already mentioned this, and that's likely connected to Aristotle's
Speaker 1: notion that God, being fully actualized, is stable, and he
Speaker 1: moves the cosmos not by performing actions, but as a
Speaker 1: beloved moves a lover. This model is very much alive
Speaker 1: in the Neoplatonic tradition that Pseudodionysius is drawing from. Now,
Speaker 1: the lowest hierarchy is concerned with the affairs of man,
Speaker 1: and principalities are the guardians and patrons of nations, and
Speaker 1: archangels and angels appear to human individuals passing on the
Speaker 1: knowledge that they receive through the angelic chain that reaches
Speaker 1: back to the very presence of God, and they invite
Speaker 1: humans to participate in this great celestial dance. And now
Speaker 1: this may get a little bit confusing here, because all
Speaker 1: of these beings are described as angels, but also angels
Speaker 1: used in a technical sense for the lowest order of angels.
Speaker 1: And these are the ones that are most likely to
Speaker 1: be involved in human affairs, because the others are too
Speaker 1: busy just contemplating the goodness of God and talking about
Speaker 1: the goodness of God. And of course what this lowest
Speaker 1: rank of angels is doing is still good, and they're
Speaker 1: fulfilling their purpose. But that purpose is well, it's more earthly, right,
Speaker 1: it's further away from the inner circle of God. And
Speaker 1: the Medievals believed that the heavens we're home to countless angels.
Speaker 1: There's no such thing as empty space in.
Speaker 2: The medieval cosmos.
Speaker 1: I mean, in our modern understanding, we tend to think
Speaker 1: that the universe is primarily empty, overwhelmingly empty, right. This
Speaker 1: is why we even use that word space as opposed
Speaker 1: to the order word of the heavens. And so while
Speaker 1: we are tempted to feel alone in the cosmos, if anything,
Speaker 1: the medieval might feel a little claustrophobic, because everything is inhabited,
Speaker 1: and so there are countless numbers of angels up in
Speaker 1: the heavens, doing their gelic things, glorying in God, passing
Speaker 1: on this knowledge, moving the spheres in imitation of the
Speaker 1: goodness and stability of God. However, in the medieval cosmos,
Speaker 1: angels were not typically the only rational species that exist
Speaker 1: aside from humans, because also, of course we have the fairies, or,
Speaker 1: as Lewis refers to them, the longevi. Now what are fairies, Well,
Speaker 1: these are creatures that really live on the borderline of understanding.
Speaker 1: There are a few different theories regarding what angels are
Speaker 1: that we see played out in the medieval and Renaissance writings,
Speaker 1: and so one possibility that they are a third rational species,
Speaker 1: distinct from angels and men. Perhaps these are the daemons
Speaker 1: of old that the Greeks talked about, these things that
Speaker 1: inhabit the air. And maybe we might say that there's
Speaker 1: something between angels and men in that they might have bodies,
Speaker 1: if that's the right word, something similar to angels, even
Speaker 1: though they have minds that perhaps are more like the
Speaker 1: minds of men, and a lot of times these fairies
Speaker 1: are associated with nature, and so maybe there are some,
Speaker 1: you know, spirits of the water, there are spirits of
Speaker 1: the forest, there are spirits of the earth. That there
Speaker 1: are these spirits that are at play in the natural.
Speaker 2: Workings of the world.
Speaker 1: And for this particular study, I'm not necessarily interested in
Speaker 1: delving into the actual reality of fairies, even though I
Speaker 1: think that's a conversation worth having, and those of you
Speaker 1: who follow me know that's something that's interest to me.
Speaker 1: But I will say that within the broad Christian tradition
Speaker 1: regarding Christian thought as well as regarding scripture, I don't
Speaker 1: see any reason to say that this first point is
Speaker 1: at all impossible, right. I mean, there are a lot
Speaker 1: of things that we're simply not told in scripture.
Speaker 2: There are a lot of.
Speaker 1: Things that orthodoxy just doesn't need to take a firm
Speaker 1: stance on. And so, you know, does this mean that
Speaker 1: you know that some kind of creature like this exists
Speaker 1: not necessarily, but also doesn't mean they necessarily don't. And
Speaker 1: that's just a little food for thought. Maybe we can
Speaker 1: talk about that more if you want to. But another
Speaker 1: possibility is that these are demoted angels of some kind,
Speaker 1: and so perhaps these are angels that were sympathetic to
Speaker 1: Lucifer and they are banished to Earth until they receive
Speaker 1: their ultimate condemnation on Doomsday. Or perhaps these are angels
Speaker 1: that remain neutral during Lucifer's rebellion and maybe they have
Speaker 1: the possibility of redemption one day. This was a common theory.
Speaker 1: Or perhaps these are undead spirits of some kind, and
Speaker 1: a lot of the fairy stories deal with something related
Speaker 1: to the undead. And then lastly, we have this view
Speaker 1: that the fairy, what we call fairies, are really just devils,
Speaker 1: that they are fallen angels, and this is the view
Speaker 1: that really picked up, especially in late Renaissance, picked up
Speaker 1: especially with the Puritans. And Lewis at actually believes that
Speaker 1: the reason why the idea of fairies as such really
Speaker 1: fell out of discourse is because of this view. And
Speaker 1: so it's not so much that science dispelled the fairies,
Speaker 1: but he actually believed that their identification with devils is
Speaker 1: what got rid of the idea of fairies as such.
Speaker 1: And for what it's worth, Lewis believes that that is
Speaker 1: not a good thing. Now, why does this medieval model
Speaker 1: of the cosmois matter because in a certain sense we
Speaker 1: know that it's not true, at least in the way
Speaker 1: that we usually use the word truth.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 1: Lewis addresses this in the end kind of an epilogue
Speaker 1: of the Discarded Image. He spends his entire book talking
Speaker 1: about the beauty in the glory in the order of
Speaker 1: the system, but then he brings up the question, well, okay,
Speaker 1: what do we actually do with this? And a lot
Speaker 1: of what I'm about to read actually just comes straight
Speaker 1: from the Discarded Image. Lewis writes, But the change of
Speaker 1: models did not involve astronomy alone. It involved also in biology.
Speaker 1: The change arguably more important from a de evolutionary to
Speaker 1: an evolutionary scheme, from a cosmology in which it is
Speaker 1: axiomatic that all perfect things precede all imperfect things, to
Speaker 1: one of which it is axiomatic that the starting point
Speaker 1: is always lower than that which is developed, and the
Speaker 1: degree of change can be gauged by the fact that
Speaker 1: primitive is now in most context a pejorative term. This
Speaker 1: revolution was certainly not brought about by the discovery of
Speaker 1: new facts, and that it goes on a little bit later.
Speaker 1: But nature gives most of her evidence in answer to
Speaker 1: the questions that we ask her. Let me repeat that,
Speaker 1: but nature gives most of her evidence in answer to
Speaker 1: the questions that we ask her. Hence, as in the courts,
Speaker 1: the character of the evidence depends on the shape of
Speaker 1: the examination. And a good cross examiner can do wonders.
Speaker 1: He will not indeed illicit falsehoods from an honest witness,
Speaker 1: but in relation to the total truth in the witness's mind,
Speaker 1: the structure of the examination is like a sensil. It
Speaker 1: determines how much of that total truth will appear in
Speaker 1: what patterns it will suggest. And so, in other words,
Speaker 1: there are a number of presuppositions that go into the
Speaker 1: questions that we ask of nature, and the questions that
Speaker 1: we ask of nature will largely determined the answers that
Speaker 1: we receive. And so is the medieval view of the
Speaker 1: cosmos right or is it wrong? Well, that very much
Speaker 1: depends on the questions that we're asking, and the questions
Speaker 1: that the modern man asks tend to be very different
Speaker 1: than the questions that the medieval man would ask. And
Speaker 1: so I mean, I don't necessarily suggest that we need to,
Speaker 1: in a physical sense return to a pre Copernican cosmos.
Speaker 1: And Lewis is very clear about that as well. He
Speaker 1: is not suggesting that we scrap our modern astronomy books
Speaker 1: and go back to a pre Copernican understanding of the
Speaker 1: physical cosmos. However, just because we're sort of rearranging the
Speaker 1: physical layout of the cosmos actually doesn't say anything to
Speaker 1: the more metaphysical reality at play in the medieval worldview.
Speaker 1: And this metaphysical reality is, of course what Lewis would
Speaker 1: have us hold on to. It is this metaphysical view
Speaker 1: of the cosmos that we see very much playing out
Speaker 1: in the Ransom trilogy or the Ransom series as well
Speaker 1: as beyond and arguably in Narnia especially as well. And
Speaker 1: we'll talk about that more once we get there. And
Speaker 1: so there is a big overview of the medieval view
Speaker 1: of the cosmos. I think that's going to give us
Speaker 1: some useful concepts and useful themes to work with as
Speaker 1: we talk about out of the Silent Planet, and as
Speaker 1: we go beyond that to Parilandra, that head of his strength, and.
Speaker 2: Then even beyond that.
Speaker 1: But for now, I can take a brief little break
Speaker 1: and then we'll actually get to you out of the
Speaker 1: Silent Planet, all right, Welcome back, so that breakway was
Speaker 1: a little bit longer that I intended for me at least,
Speaker 1: it's now a different day, and my light bulb burned out,
Speaker 1: and so I had to open the shades in the background.
Speaker 1: And so I do apologize that from time to time
Speaker 1: you're going to see the sun pouring forth from the background.
Speaker 1: But I mean a lot of everything that we just
Speaker 1: talked about. Maybe we can come up with some kind
Speaker 1: of cosmological significance of that, but regardless, let's go ahead
Speaker 1: and finally get started on out of the Silent Planet.
Speaker 1: We're going to start by looking at the introduction, the
Speaker 1: setup for the story in the first couple of chapters.
Speaker 1: It's a way of setting the mood and looking at
Speaker 1: some of the themes that hopefully we'll awaken something in the
Speaker 1: reading that you've already done. As we find out from
Speaker 1: the Fox until we have faces much later on, we
Speaker 1: see that even the past is not settled, because as
Speaker 1: we're told, the divine nature can even change the past.
Speaker 1: And so let's go ahead and see what happens. Right
Speaker 1: at the very beginning the initial scene, we're told a
Speaker 1: violent yellow sunset was pouring through a rift in the
Speaker 1: clouds to westward, but straight ahead over the hills. The
Speaker 1: sky was the color of dark slate. Every tree in
Speaker 1: blade of grass was dripping, and the road shone like
Speaker 1: a river. Now, one thing I think is worth considering here,
Speaker 1: even aside from the specific imagery that's coming through in
Speaker 1: these sentences, is just the vivid, very sensual, very sense
Speaker 1: experiential language that we get throughout Lewis's writing. His descriptive
Speaker 1: almost just kind of drips off the pages. It's meant
Speaker 1: to kind of overwhelm you, or perhaps a better way
Speaker 1: of saying that it's meant to beckon you. It's meant
Speaker 1: to call you into something fluid, something moving, because you
Speaker 1: yourself are supposed to be moved through the narrative. Who
Speaker 1: tends to write what in literary language would be called
Speaker 1: a romance. And I don't mean like a cheesy romantic novel.
Speaker 1: What I mean by romance is this is something that's
Speaker 1: supposed to call you forth on a grand existential journey.
Speaker 1: That there's a mystical quality here. It's meant to not
Speaker 1: just be this adventure story where you know, this happens,
Speaker 1: this happens, and this happens, and you have all these
Speaker 1: you know, thrilling plot twists, even though yeah, we get
Speaker 1: that here and there, Fundamentally, what we don't get are
Speaker 1: thrilling plot twists. Really, what we get are perhaps twists
Speaker 1: in our understanding of reality, our understanding of the world,
Speaker 1: more so than simply our understanding of the thrilling narrative.
Speaker 1: And so this language here is very central. It's meant
Speaker 1: to evoke a mood, it's meant to bring us into something.
Speaker 1: And I think that this really speaks to Lewis's medievalist sympathies,
Speaker 1: where wisdom is really about orienting yourself towards the good
Speaker 1: and about consuming the goods, about being consumed by the good.
Speaker 1: It's about losing yourself in light of what goodness is,
Speaker 1: what reality most fundamentally is, and it's when we lose
Speaker 1: ourself to the right thing, in the right way, that
Speaker 1: we actually come to find ourselves. And so this is
Speaker 1: why Lewis is going to use this very almost overwhelming
Speaker 1: sense language throughout his descriptive prose. There's this poetic nature
Speaker 1: to everything that he writes. But anyways, to the specific
Speaker 1: imagery here, Okay, we're told that, Okay, it's cloudy, right,
Speaker 1: there's this the sky itself is the color of dark slate.
Speaker 1: But the sun is piercing through this dark slate ceiling,
Speaker 1: and so we get the sense that Ransom, that the
Speaker 1: Earth that Ransom is currently inhabiting, is closed off to
Speaker 1: the heavens above. Right, it has almost a ceiling to it,
Speaker 1: and so it is self contained. It is not looking
Speaker 1: out to the heavens. However, we're told not that his
Speaker 1: vision went up to the sunset, or we're told that
Speaker 1: the yellow sunset was pouring through.
Speaker 2: A ripped in the clouds.
Speaker 1: And so we see from the very beginning that the
Speaker 1: sun the heavens are piercing the roof of this world.
Speaker 1: And that really does set the theme for what's going
Speaker 1: to happen in this entire series. Right, it's all about
Speaker 1: Earth being exposed to the heavens, that this void in
Speaker 1: the cosmos is going to be brought to terms with
Speaker 1: what it is meant to be. It's going to be
Speaker 1: brought back into conversation with the heavens, for better or
Speaker 1: for worse, depending on who you are and where it
Speaker 1: is that you're standing. Okay, So Soul is shining its
Speaker 1: rays through the rift in this terrestrial ceiling, and it's
Speaker 1: illuminating the grass, it's illuminating the road, it's causing the
Speaker 1: road itself to shine, perhaps even to shine like gold,
Speaker 1: gold which is produced by soul in the medieval cosmological framework.
Speaker 1: And so he's walking on this path of gold. He's
Speaker 1: being led upward, back to Soul, back to the place
Speaker 1: of reason, and ultimately back to the heavens, where we
Speaker 1: are meant to have fellowship with this angelic reality that
Speaker 1: happens in the cosmos. And so there's a lot that's
Speaker 1: contained in this rather mundane initial setup of this scene. Now,
Speaker 1: also in the introduction, we get a few i think,
Speaker 1: rather clear, rather intentional connections to Dante. And so let's
Speaker 1: talk about Dante a little bit, who did have some
Speaker 1: special significance for Lewis. Christina Hale says that Dante's poetry
Speaker 1: encapsulates everything that Lewis loved about the medieval cosmos, the
Speaker 1: light and life, the bursting vivacity and creativity, and the
Speaker 1: rich tapestry of ideas and images, emotions and languages that
Speaker 1: the medieval model presents. And I should say that Dante
Speaker 1: captured Lewis's imagination a good while before his conversion to Christianity.
Speaker 1: See a lot of times people think that Lewis had
Speaker 1: a Christian message and then fantasy myth provided a good
Speaker 1: vehicle for conveying that Christian message, and that's why he
Speaker 1: wrote fantastical stories. And this is especially said of Narnia. However,
Speaker 1: this is actually not right in many ways, it's the
Speaker 1: reverse of the reality because mythology stories, both Pagan and Christian,
Speaker 1: captured Lewis's imagination very early on and stayed with them,
Speaker 1: became an important formative part of who he was and
Speaker 1: how he thought and how he desired. And so Lewis
Speaker 1: didn't choose this genre to convey Christian truth. It actually
Speaker 1: is his love of myth that is largely responsible for
Speaker 1: leading him to Christianity. It was in his conversation with
Speaker 1: Tolkien when he realized that perhaps there's actually some reality
Speaker 1: to the things that he's always loved. And to get
Speaker 1: more on this, I recommend that you read Lewis's essay
Speaker 1: Myth Became Fact, and when she talks about the fact
Speaker 1: that all the things that he loves in Great Pathology,
Speaker 1: even great Pagan mythology, ultimately speaks to something real to
Speaker 1: the myth that became fact.
Speaker 2: In Jesus Christ.
Speaker 1: And so from many ways, voices like Dante served as
Speaker 1: pre evangelism for Lewis. They gave him a familiarity with
Speaker 1: certain ideas that became more real with his conversion. Okay,
Speaker 1: so let's look at some thematic connections here. And so,
Speaker 1: first looking at Dante, we're told, at the beginning of
Speaker 1: the Divine Comedy, midway along the journey of our life,
Speaker 1: I woke to find myself in a dark wood, for
Speaker 1: I had wandered off the straight path. And so here
Speaker 1: do we have a middle aged wanderer, the pilgrim, going
Speaker 1: through a dark wood, not on the path he originally
Speaker 1: set off on. Now's look over at out of the
Speaker 1: silent planet. The last drops of the thundershower had hardly
Speaker 1: ceased falling when the pedestrian and so no, we're not
Speaker 1: even giving his name right now, or he'd called the
Speaker 1: pedestrian much like Dante's pilgrim. The pedestrian stuffed his map
Speaker 1: into his pocket, settled his pack more comfortably on his
Speaker 1: tired shoulders, and stepped out from the shelter of a
Speaker 1: large chestnut tree into the middle of the road. He
Speaker 1: was tall, but a little round shouldered, about thirty five
Speaker 1: to forty years of age. In fact, he was a
Speaker 1: philologist and a fellow of a Cambridge college. And so
Speaker 1: Dante gives us a middle aged pilgrim poet. Lewis gives
Speaker 1: us a middle aged philologist pedestrian. And so I think
Speaker 1: that there is some very intentional parallelism happening here. Next
Speaker 1: another example, Dante says, I raised my head and saw
Speaker 1: the hilltop shawled in morning rays of light sent from
Speaker 1: the planet that leads men straight ahead on every road.
Speaker 1: Now over to Lewis, he had walked thus for a
Speaker 1: matter of two miles when he became aware of a
Speaker 1: light ahead. He was close under the hills by now,
Speaker 1: and it was nearly dark, so that he still cherished
Speaker 1: hopes of a substantial farmhouse until he was quite close
Speaker 1: to the real origin of the light, which proved to
Speaker 1: be a very small cottage of ugly nineteenth century brick.
Speaker 1: And so again thematic connection here, some parallelism in language.
Speaker 1: We get that just as Dante Lewis sees a light
Speaker 1: over the hill, now Dante tells us that the light
Speaker 1: that he saw was the morning rays of light sent
Speaker 1: from the planet that leads men straight ahead on every road.
Speaker 1: And so here we get a kind of divine providence
Speaker 1: shining forth, and that's the light that Dante's following. Now
Speaker 1: Lewis here, and this is I think really interesting. Lewis's
Speaker 1: light is actually the light coming from the cottage, and
Speaker 1: so this is not a heavenly light, at least not
Speaker 1: most directly. But I think what Louis is doing here
Speaker 1: is that he's not just saying, Okay, I'm writing a
Speaker 1: story that's going to parallel Dante's divine comedy. No, what
Speaker 1: he's doing is he's kind of riffing off of Dante,
Speaker 1: and he's doing it and I think it's a really
Speaker 1: sophisticated way. And so one hand, this seems to be
Speaker 1: a very mundane light coming from the cottage. However, in
Speaker 1: light of Dante, what Lewis is telling us is that
Speaker 1: this mundane light is actually a reflection or something that's
Speaker 1: participating in the heavenly light of Providence. And so this
Speaker 1: is going to be a major theme throughout the Ransom series,
Speaker 1: the idea that really there is no such thing as
Speaker 1: the mundane, that even though the earth in some ways
Speaker 1: is closed off from the heavens, it is still part
Speaker 1: of the heavens. It is still playing a role in
Speaker 1: the big story, even if it's not necessarily doing so intentionally.
Speaker 1: And so even mundane things participate in supernatural realities. And
Speaker 1: so Lewis is going to continually break down the barriers
Speaker 1: that we tend to create between the terrestrial and the celestial,
Speaker 1: between the natural, the supernatural, the mundane and the spectacular.
Speaker 1: And this is something he very often does right where
Speaker 1: Lewis will break down these borders and help us to
Speaker 1: recognize the glory in what we normally think of as
Speaker 1: inglorious common things. And so this is one way that
Speaker 1: Lewis is going to work to re enchant our vision
Speaker 1: and help us to recognize the fantastical in everything around us.
Speaker 1: And so this is one hand. Yeah, it's the light
Speaker 1: of a small cottage, but it's much more than that. Ultimately,
Speaker 1: it is the light of Providence piercing the shadows. It
Speaker 1: is the light of the sun piercing the rift in
Speaker 1: the clouds, shining into this dark world. And so there
Speaker 1: are a number of things that are happening at play here.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 1: However, I think that we need to be careful here.
Speaker 1: I've seen that some people will look at these early
Speaker 1: connections to Dante and then use the Divine Comedy as
Speaker 1: some kind of map for understanding out of the Silent
Speaker 1: Planet as a whole, or even the entire Ransom series.
Speaker 1: For example, in Deeper Heaven, Christina Hale is going to
Speaker 1: try to say that out of the side of the
Speaker 1: planet gives us hell, Perlandra gives us Purgatory, and that
Speaker 1: hideous strength gives us heaven. And I mean, there are
Speaker 1: some ways to do that, but I just don't think
Speaker 1: that that naturally works. I don't think that Lewis is
Speaker 1: trying to give us the Divine Comedy reworked. I think
Speaker 1: what he's doing is he's using Dante as a thematic backdrop.
Speaker 1: And so this is a conversation with Dante, or it's
Speaker 1: an inspiration from Dante. But it's not just a modern
Speaker 1: take on Dante. Right, So some other literary connections here.
Speaker 1: I'm combining a couple ideas together here with this title,
Speaker 1: Sir Ransom in Wonderland, and so we get some Arthurian
Speaker 1: themes here. And so we see that a woman gives
Speaker 1: Ransom a quest to save an innocent and a vulnerable soul,
Speaker 1: and then with unflinching courage, Ransom accepts the quest and
Speaker 1: sets off for a dark wood.
Speaker 2: And you know, we're.
Speaker 1: Giving this idea here that Ransom didn't even consider this
Speaker 1: request to go and save her son. It's something that
Speaker 1: he just did with reflexive courage. And so we see
Speaker 1: here the same kind of thing we see in Mallory's
Speaker 1: Tale of the Knights of King Arthur, where they receive
Speaker 1: these quests and they just go off and do them,
Speaker 1: because that's what knights do. And then you know, he
Speaker 1: specifically he goes into a dark wood, which very often is,
Speaker 1: you know, where the real quest begins. This is when
Speaker 1: the brave Knights will encounter something fantastical which sometimes kind
Speaker 1: of unnerves them, and this is when we get a
Speaker 1: sense of what that real quest is and they have
Speaker 1: to do some fantastical feat in order to save the day,
Speaker 1: to fulfill the quest that they initially set out on.
Speaker 1: And I mean in classic tales, the wood almost always
Speaker 1: stands for chaos, for the unknown, for that which is
Speaker 1: beyond the border of civilization, for uncharted territory, and so
Speaker 1: this is where you never know what's going to happen,
Speaker 1: and this is very much what we see happen with Ransom.
Speaker 1: This is when he enters into this fantastical reality and
Speaker 1: he starts to get sent on his real quest. And
Speaker 1: then just a little side note here, we're told that
Speaker 1: west and Divine are currently residing in a house previously
Speaker 1: occupied by someone named Alice. I can't help but to
Speaker 1: think that this is intentional, that this is a Wonderland reference,
Speaker 1: that this is where Ransom is going to find his
Speaker 1: rabbit hole, where he's going to enter into this fantastical,
Speaker 1: this strange reality, and where he's going to lose his
Speaker 1: footing before he gains it again. Next and I don't
Speaker 1: have a whole lot to say about this, but I
Speaker 1: think it's worth paying attention to some of this language here.
Speaker 1: This is shortly after Ransom has encountered Divine and Weston,
Speaker 1: and we see the following who are you ball the
Speaker 1: thick man? My name is Ransom, if that is what
Speaker 1: you mean, And by Jove said the slender man, not Ransom.
Speaker 1: He used to be a weddingshaw. We really need to
Speaker 1: focus on this. By Jove here one hand, yeah, that's
Speaker 1: a common British expression, but Lewis chooses his words very carefully,
Speaker 1: and perhaps you may remember that Jove is another name
Speaker 1: for Jupiter. The king of the planets who orders the heavens.
Speaker 1: And so what we see here is, you know, regardless
Speaker 1: of what was actually meant in the story, we see
Speaker 1: that ultimately it is by Jove that Ransom is here.
Speaker 1: It is by Jove that Ransom is being led into danger, ultimately,
Speaker 1: because this is what's going to bring about the most
Speaker 1: good for Ransom as well as for the Earth and
Speaker 1: maybe even the heavens. And so Jove is ultimately responsible
Speaker 1: despite the fact that Ransom seems to be falling into chaos,
Speaker 1: and so there is order even when chaos seems to
Speaker 1: be raining. And eventually this is something that Ransom will
Speaker 1: come to appreciate more and to understand more than he
Speaker 1: does this moment. And so whenever you see an expression
Speaker 1: like that, like by Jove or you know, if hell
Speaker 1: is used, even as an obscenity, it's used purposeful. It's
Speaker 1: used to communicate something, to evoke a mood, to signal
Speaker 1: something to the reader. Right, all right, next, let's talk
Speaker 1: a little bit about Divine and Western First, just looking
Speaker 1: at their names, we see that they are corruptions.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: Divine is surely a corruption of the divine, and Weston
Speaker 1: is a corruption of the West, of the ideals of
Speaker 1: the West, of progress, of reason, of transcendence, and I
Speaker 1: don't think it's unreasonable to draw a connection here to
Speaker 1: the Ekalabath, that as the fall of numanor Neumonor, being,
Speaker 1: of course Tolkien's Elantas story, newman Ar being described as
Speaker 1: the true West, that this is the westernmost place of
Speaker 1: men who live closest to the realm of the Valor,
Speaker 1: the undying lands. If you don't know, you're Tolkien. In history.
Speaker 1: In the First Age of Middle Earth, more Goth, who
Speaker 1: is really kind of a Satan figure, the big bad
Speaker 1: of the First Age, he gets defeated as the Valar
Speaker 1: finally come into play and wage war against more Goth
Speaker 1: and his forces. And the men who sided with the
Speaker 1: Valar in their fight against more Goth are rewarded with
Speaker 1: the island of Numenor, and they're rewarded with long lives
Speaker 1: as well well. Eventually, these privileges that they have start
Speaker 1: to become their downfall, as instead of having gratitude for
Speaker 1: the gift they've been given for the longevity of their lives,
Speaker 1: the instead start to lust after what is even better,
Speaker 1: and that of course is immortality, and so This begins
Speaker 1: as they start to form really this kind of death
Speaker 1: cult where they really pour resources, poor focus, poor energy
Speaker 1: into embalming toward these great tombs as a way of
Speaker 1: sort of imitating life through their practices surrounding death. Well,
Speaker 1: eventually even that is not enough, and so with the
Speaker 1: encouragement of Sauron, they eventually wage war on the Valor.
Speaker 1: They seek to take the Undying Lands by force, but
Speaker 1: that doesn't go well for them. They never actually make
Speaker 1: it to the shore of the undying land before their
Speaker 1: fleet and their entire island is sunk to the bottom
Speaker 1: of the sea. So in their pursuit of transcendence, they
Speaker 1: actually end up plummeting downward to the depths of the sea.
Speaker 1: And so those who most grasp at progress, who most
Speaker 1: grasp at transcendence, those who worship their reason, ultimately become
Speaker 1: consumed by it, and so their pursuit of transcendence ultimately
Speaker 1: leads to their downfall. If you're familiar with Paradise loss,
Speaker 1: this is ultimately what happened to Satan. He started to
Speaker 1: worship his own reason, and that's what led to his fall,
Speaker 1: both spiritually existentially as well as cosmically. And like I said,
Speaker 1: I don't think it's at all a stretch to connect
Speaker 1: Weston to the true West of Numenor, seeing as Numenor
Speaker 1: itself is actually going to be mentioned later in the
Speaker 1: series as the true West, and so it's not at
Speaker 1: all a stretch to see that play out here. Now,
Speaker 1: another connection here to the fact that Vine and Weston
Speaker 1: are trying to reach upward, but in so doing, or
Speaker 1: actually reaching downward, they say to each other, we ought
Speaker 1: to have a dog in this place, said Weston to
Speaker 1: his companion, ignoring Ransom. You mean we should have a
Speaker 1: dog if you hadn't insist on using Tartar for an experiment,
Speaker 1: said the man who had not yet spoken.
Speaker 2: And so we see that.
Speaker 1: Weston and Divine, as part of their pursuit of transcendence,
Speaker 1: we're experimenting on a dog named Tartar, surely a connection
Speaker 1: to Tartarus, and so they're playing with forces of hell
Speaker 1: even as they're trying to reach for the heavens to Next,
Speaker 1: I want to talk about this.
Speaker 2: Weird dream that Ransom had.
Speaker 1: So after Ransom gets drugged, he has this dream which
Speaker 1: reads us something like a vision. And so Weston, Divine,
Speaker 1: and Ransom are in this walled garden and they can't
Speaker 1: get through the door, and so Weston Divine climb over it.
Speaker 1: But then they're pulled back through the door back into
Speaker 1: the garden, while Ransom is stuck on top of the wall,
Speaker 1: sort of straddling the edge between the darkness and the light,
Speaker 1: the known and the unknown, the garden and whatever it
Speaker 1: is that's outside. I'm told that Ransom found it impossible
Speaker 1: to get down from the wall. He remained sitting, not frightened,
Speaker 1: but rather uncomfortable because his right leg, which was on
Speaker 1: the outside, felt so dark and his left leg felt
Speaker 1: so light. My leg will drop off if it gets
Speaker 1: much darker, he said. Then he looked down into the
Speaker 1: darkness and asked.
Speaker 2: Who are you?
Speaker 1: And the queer people must still have been there, for
Speaker 1: they all replied, whoo who just like owls? All right,
Speaker 1: so this is kind of weird. In all the commentaries
Speaker 1: and analyzes that I looked at here, a lot of
Speaker 1: them said, you know, we don't fully understand what's happening here.
Speaker 1: And I actually appreciate that because it really makes this
Speaker 1: feel more like a dream than simply a literary tool, right,
Speaker 1: because dreams very often have these this range. This collection
Speaker 1: of symbols that all doesn't always make sense as a
Speaker 1: you know, coherent essay might, and so what we have
Speaker 1: here are some themes, some pictures that are coming unicating something,
Speaker 1: but it's not super clear, and so just talk about
Speaker 1: a little bit about what seems to be happening here. Well,
Speaker 1: for one thing, we see that Western and ta Vine
Speaker 1: are trying to get somewhere that they're not invited to.
Speaker 1: We get the sense that they're breaking into something or
Speaker 1: I guess breaking out of something through some unjust means,
Speaker 1: and that you know, in the end, they're pulled back
Speaker 1: into the garden where they began, and so they never
Speaker 1: successfully become engaged with whatever this world is that's beyond.
Speaker 1: We get the sense that it's closed off to them.
Speaker 1: Whatever this outside reality is, it is closed off to them.
Speaker 1: They are not permitted no matter how much they try
Speaker 1: to contrive a pathway, they are not permitted to leave.
Speaker 1: And so I think what it shows us is that
Speaker 1: even when they successfully make it out to the heavens,
Speaker 1: when they start to visit this other planet, they're still
Speaker 1: living as citizens of the silent planet. They never get
Speaker 1: in large perspectives, and so they are continually closed off
Speaker 1: from the heavens, from true reality. Ransom, however, he serves
Speaker 1: as a bridge. He's not thrown back into the garden,
Speaker 1: nor is he fully on the outside of the garden.
Speaker 1: He is a bridge, He is a connection, He is
Speaker 1: a halfway point. He is the union between the Earth
Speaker 1: and the heavens. And so he plays this mediator role,
Speaker 1: he plays this priestly role. And I think this is
Speaker 1: a theme, an important theme that we're going to see
Speaker 1: developed throughout the Ransom series. You know, if you've read
Speaker 1: Perlandra already, think of when he's referred to as piebald, right,
Speaker 1: he's half dark and he's half light. I think that's
Speaker 1: a continuation of the same theme that we see here,
Speaker 1: the idea that Ransom has a foot in both worlds.
Speaker 1: He is going to be a bridge, He's going to
Speaker 1: be a union between heaven and Earth. Well, a short
Speaker 1: while later, Ransom finds himself finally in space, and he
Speaker 1: encounters this with absolute terror. As he comes to this realization,
Speaker 1: he says, you mean we're in space? Ransom uttered the
Speaker 1: word with difficulty, as a frightened child speaks of ghosts
Speaker 1: or a frightened man of cancer. And this is something
Speaker 1: that Lewis talks about in some of his essays that
Speaker 1: there are really two kinds of fears. So one hand,
Speaker 1: you can be afraid of something that poses some obvious
Speaker 1: danger to you right right that there's a lion in
Speaker 1: the room next to you, that instills a certain kind
Speaker 1: of obvious physical terror. But there's also the kind of
Speaker 1: terror that comes from not what something would do to you,
Speaker 1: but simply the fact that something is, that something threatens
Speaker 1: your existence in a pretty fundamental way, that something serves
Speaker 1: to just unnerve you. And so that's the kind of
Speaker 1: terror that we have here. It is the terror of space.
Speaker 1: And this is such an important passage that I think
Speaker 1: it's worth me just taking the time to read it
Speaker 1: and for us to just kind of reflect on it,
Speaker 1: to dwell on it. This is one of the most
Speaker 1: influential passages on me out of the entire story. And
Speaker 1: so here go but Ransom. As time wore on became
Speaker 1: aware of another and more spiritual cause for his progressive
Speaker 1: lightning and exaltation of heart. A nightmare long engendered in
Speaker 1: the modern mind by the mythology that follows the wake
Speaker 1: of science, was falling off him. He had read of
Speaker 1: space at the back of his thinking. For years had
Speaker 1: lurked the dismal fancy of the black, cold vacuity, the
Speaker 1: utter deadness which was supposed to separate the worlds. He
Speaker 1: had not known how much it affected him till now
Speaker 1: now that the very name space seemed to blasphemous libel
Speaker 1: for the impurian ocean of radiance in which they'd swam.
Speaker 1: He could not call it dead. He felt life pouring
Speaker 1: into him from it every moment. How indeed, could it
Speaker 1: be otherwise, Since out of this ocean the worlds, in
Speaker 1: all their life, had come. He had thought it barren.
Speaker 1: He saw now that it was the womb of worlds,
Speaker 1: whose blazing and innumerable offspring looked down nightly even upon
Speaker 1: the earth, with so many eyes, and here how many more. No,
Speaker 1: Space was the wrong name. Older thinkers had been wiser
Speaker 1: when they named it simply the heavens, the heavens which
Speaker 1: declared the glory, the happy climes that lie where day
Speaker 1: never shuts his eye up in the broad fields of
Speaker 1: the sky. He quoted Milton's word to himself lovingly at
Speaker 1: this time, and often Christina Hale reflects on this, saying,
Speaker 1: to think of the heavens as the great outer darkness,
Speaker 1: as our modern minds often do, is through a place
Speaker 1: heaven with hell. Thinking this way restructures the imaginative layout
Speaker 1: of the cosmos and changes the way we look up
Speaker 1: at the night sky. It rejects the view of thousands
Speaker 1: of years of prophets and poets in favor of listening
Speaker 1: to science without entertaining the idea that perhaps that our
Speaker 1: realities that are deeper than the material, that we are
Speaker 1: not yet real enough to see them. I like this
Speaker 1: a lot. I think it gets it fundamentally right that
Speaker 1: we have replaced heaven with hell. Go back to the
Speaker 1: old world and they talk about the heavens teeming with life,
Speaker 1: with purpose, with significance, with angelic choirs.
Speaker 2: Hris.
Speaker 1: Now we look beyond the Earth's atmosphere and what we
Speaker 1: see is space, we see the outer darkness. What we
Speaker 1: see is hell. And that's not inconsequential. But I think
Speaker 1: that this is necessarily what happens when we let science
Speaker 1: play philosophy something that it was never meant to do.
Speaker 1: I'm not against science, and Lewis is not against science.
Speaker 1: What he is against is mistaking science for philosophy. Science does,
Speaker 1: is it examines material realities. It helps us to understand
Speaker 1: material realities. But material realities don't tell us anything about purpose.
Speaker 1: It doesn't tell us anything about metaphysical realities. It doesn't
Speaker 1: tell us anything about teilos, about goals, or about how
Speaker 1: we should live. It doesn't tell us anything about what to.
Speaker 2: Do with these material realities.
Speaker 1: And so we're doing something wrong when we say that
Speaker 1: the way to understand reality is to do science, because well,
Speaker 1: reality itself is a metaphysical structure of reality. We're putting
Speaker 1: things together in a meaningful, coherent way that science doesn't
Speaker 1: actually have anything to do with. And so science is
Speaker 1: a tool. Science is not philosophy. And when we let
Speaker 1: science play philosophy, what we get is hell. And that's
Speaker 1: something that we're going to see throughout this series in
Speaker 1: very vivid terms. And I think it's worth throwing in
Speaker 1: here this quote from the Don Tretder And we'll talk
Speaker 1: about more of this when we actually get there in
Speaker 1: our study, but let's just look at it now. In
Speaker 1: our world, said Eustace, a star is a huge ball
Speaker 1: of flaming gas. Even in your world, my son, that
Speaker 1: is not what a star is, but only what it
Speaker 1: is made of. And here I think we get a
Speaker 1: pretty strong rebuke of our misunderstanding of what science is
Speaker 1: and what science is able to accomplish. All right, next
Speaker 1: to the crew starts to land on Malachandra, and this
Speaker 1: process is very unnerving, is very unsettling. We get the
Speaker 1: sense that they are falling out of Heaven. It says
Speaker 1: now with a certainty which never after deserted him. He
Speaker 1: saw the planets the Earth. He called them in his
Speaker 1: thought as mere holes or gaps in the living heaven,
Speaker 1: excluded and rejected waste of heavy matter and murky air,
Speaker 1: formed not by addition to, but by subtraction from the
Speaker 1: surrounding brightness. And so this is not a fallen planet
Speaker 1: like Earth. This is at least mostly a good planet. However,
Speaker 1: even a good planet is not the heavens. And so
Speaker 1: we get the sense that even though he's in a
Speaker 1: place now that's better than Earth, he's still moving away
Speaker 1: from reality. Remember that within the Platonic scheme, reality is
Speaker 1: a spectrum where some things are more real than others,
Speaker 1: and that which is most real is the good. And
Speaker 1: so there's a certain sense in which the heavens come
Speaker 1: before the planets, both historically as well as ontologically, in
Speaker 1: their nature, in their being, they are in many ways
Speaker 1: more important. And so as he moves toward the heavens,
Speaker 1: he gets this levity, He gets the sense that he's
Speaker 1: moving toward that which is more real. As he moves
Speaker 1: down to the planet, out of the heavens, he's still
Speaker 1: somewhere good, but it's the direction of movement that matters.
Speaker 1: He's moving away from that which is best. And so
Speaker 1: that's why this is such a rough landing. And then
Speaker 1: I love this, he says. And yet he thought, beyond
Speaker 1: the solar system, the brightness ends. Is that the real void,
Speaker 1: the real death, unless he groped for the idea, unless
Speaker 1: visible light is also a hole or gap, a mere
Speaker 1: diminution of something else, something that is to bright unchanging heaven,
Speaker 1: as heaven is to the dark heavy earths. And so
Speaker 1: he's just reflecting on web talking about the idea that
Speaker 1: reality is a spectrum, and so he thinks, of, okay,
Speaker 1: light is more real than darkness, and so perhaps it
Speaker 1: is beyond this realm of physical light where we finally
Speaker 1: get what we call space, where we finally get emptiness,
Speaker 1: that is the real void, the real death. However, then
Speaker 1: it dawns out on that. Wait, what if even though
Speaker 1: at that point we're beyond the realm of physical light,
Speaker 1: there actually is not nothing, but there's actually something even more
Speaker 1: of a something, that there's something even more real that
Speaker 1: as Earth is to the heavens, perhaps the physical heavens
Speaker 1: are to something else, something more real, something greater right,
Speaker 1: something that we don't have the means of dealing with.
Speaker 1: And remember what I said before about how biblically speaking,
Speaker 1: sometimes God is portrayed as living in unapproachable light, other
Speaker 1: times as living in impenetrable darkness. And I think that's
Speaker 1: something of what he's getting at here, that whatever is
Speaker 1: most real makes reality as we know it.
Speaker 2: Seem like unreality.
Speaker 1: And so then we get what I think it's pretty
Speaker 1: profound Christian platonic meditation taking place here. Now, he finally
Speaker 1: gets his way out of the spaceship and gets his
Speaker 1: first sights of the planet, and we're told that he
Speaker 1: saw nothing but colors, colors that refuse to form themselves
Speaker 1: into things. Moreover, he knew nothing yet well enough to
Speaker 1: see it. You cannot see things till you know roughly
Speaker 1: what they are. Now, Remember for Lewis and for Plato
Speaker 1: and the Platonic tradition, the form of something is more
Speaker 1: real than the particular, and so you can't really know
Speaker 1: what a just action is unless you first know what
Speaker 1: justice is, and so you need to understand the form
Speaker 1: before you can understand the particular. I think that's what
Speaker 1: we see playing out here.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 1: A few more first impressions of the planet. Here, we're
Speaker 1: told that he sees all this vegetation that's really upward focused,
Speaker 1: that because of the way that gravity works here, all
Speaker 1: the planets are very thin, very spindily, and they're all
Speaker 1: pointing upward, and so we get this strong directional orientation
Speaker 1: to the plant life. And I think this is getting
Speaker 1: at a few things here. First of all, we see
Speaker 1: this Mars Sylvani's theme that Mars, although the martial spirit
Speaker 1: and the god of war, is also a god of vegetation,
Speaker 1: and so we get the springtimes, the idea of life,
Speaker 1: this idea of a upward movement. And I don't actually
Speaker 1: don't even remember which book I read this end, but
Speaker 1: there's this discussion in one of the text about how
Speaker 1: a lot of Ransom's experience on this planet is a
Speaker 1: range in a very vertical direction. And so we have
Speaker 1: plant life is rising up. You've got the inhabitants of
Speaker 1: the planet occupy three distinct geographical parts of the planet,
Speaker 1: and so you've got the fifthil Triggy at the bottom,
Speaker 1: kind of in the caverns in the valley. You've got
Speaker 1: the Harassa living in the middle, and then you've got the
Speaker 1: Sorens living on the higher level. And even Rainsom's journey,
Speaker 1: he begins on the level of the Harassa, then he
Speaker 1: moves up to where the Sworns live, and then finally
Speaker 1: he makes his way up to Mildelorn. And so we
Speaker 1: get this up and down pattern. And one of the
Speaker 1: texts you brought to the fact that you know, perhaps
Speaker 1: there's even some kind of phallic imagery. I don't want
Speaker 1: to get too weird with this, but I mean, Mars
Speaker 1: is a masculine planet, and in light of some of
Speaker 1: the things that Lewis has said elsewhere, I don't think
Speaker 1: this is beyond the pale.
Speaker 2: Okay.
Speaker 1: Next, one of the first things that happened is after
Speaker 1: they start to encounter the storm, then the Hanakra shows up,
Speaker 1: and so we get a physical altercation taking place, which
Speaker 1: I think very much speaks to the militant mood of
Speaker 1: this planet, Ransom, he runs away, and eventually he encounters
Speaker 1: the Horassum, and I just love this scene here where
Speaker 1: he first encounters the Harassa. I'm not gonna read all this,
Speaker 1: but you know, he doesn't really know what this creature is,
Speaker 1: but he starts to recognize that it's trying to speak
Speaker 1: with him, that has some kind of intelligible language, and
Speaker 1: so one hand, he's afraid for his life. He doesn't
Speaker 1: really know what's going to happen, but at the same time,
Speaker 1: he's kind of daydreaming about writing a Malacandrian grammar book,
Speaker 1: which I think is kind of amusing, but also it
Speaker 1: speaks to the fact that Ransom is starting to be transformed. Remember,
Speaker 1: just a short while ago, he saw the idea of
Speaker 1: space itself as terrifying, but he's overcome that, and now
Speaker 1: he's overcoming his you know, wellsy and fear of the unknown,
Speaker 1: intelligent extraterrestrial, and he's starting to treat this as being
Speaker 1: kind of normal. And so we get the sense that
Speaker 1: the Malachandrian air is doing something to him, just as
Speaker 1: the air of Narnia does something to Ennoble and to
Speaker 1: transform the children who visit there. So he spend some
Speaker 1: time with the Rasa. There are some I think significant
Speaker 1: philosophical conversations that happened there, but we'll talk about that,
Speaker 1: probably during the live meetings, maybe on the discord. But
Speaker 1: eventually we get to the Hinakra hunt, which very much
Speaker 1: speaks to the martial spirit of this planet and of
Speaker 1: their Oyarsa. So hoy says, I long to kill the Sinakra,
Speaker 1: as he also longs to kill me. I hope that
Speaker 1: my ship will be the first, and I first in
Speaker 1: my ship with my straight spear when the black jaws snap.
Speaker 1: And if he kills me, my people will mourn, and
Speaker 1: my brothers will desire still more to kill him, but
Speaker 1: they will not wish that we're no HERNAKEI nor do I.
Speaker 1: And so what we see here is that you know,
Speaker 1: this is an unfallen planet, yet there is violence. We'll
Speaker 1: see is that violence is not necessarily sinful. I mean,
Speaker 1: I guess, at least on this planet, that there is
Speaker 1: an ennobled way that co it can take place, and
Speaker 1: perhaps especially in the pagan past, which I think is
Speaker 1: largely what we're seeing here on Malachandra. And we'll talk
Speaker 1: about that a bit more, and we'll get to some
Speaker 1: of the conversations in Perilandra. I think by the fact
Speaker 1: that some of the Psalms and elsewhere talks about how
Speaker 1: God provides for the lions, and of course how does
Speaker 1: he do that by giving them prey? And so we
Speaker 1: get this sense here that not all conflict is bad.
Speaker 1: We get a bit more in this next section from
Speaker 1: hoy As. He says, I will tell you a day
Speaker 1: in my life that has shaped me, such a day
Speaker 1: as comes only once, like love or serving Oyarsa in Meldlorn.
Speaker 1: Then I was young, not much more than a cub,
Speaker 1: when I went far, far up the Andromat, to the
Speaker 1: land where stars shine at midday and even water is cold,
Speaker 1: a great waterfall I climbed. I stood on the shore
Speaker 1: of Balky, the pool which is the place of most
Speaker 1: awe in all worlds. The walls of it go up
Speaker 1: forever and ever, and huge and holy images are cut
Speaker 1: in them, the work of old times. There is the
Speaker 1: fall called the Mountain of water. Because I stood there
Speaker 1: alone malel Den, for even Oyarsa sent me no word.
Speaker 1: My heart has been higher, my song deeper, all my days.
Speaker 1: But do you think it would have been so unless
Speaker 1: I had known that in that Balky Hernaki dwelled. There,
Speaker 1: I drink life, because death was in the pool. That
Speaker 1: was the best of drinks save one. What one ask
Speaker 1: Ransom death itself in the day, I drink it and
Speaker 1: go to Maleldo. And so here again we get the
Speaker 1: sense that there is life to be found even in death,
Speaker 1: that there's something about this fight. There's something about the
Speaker 1: reality of death, whether it be that of the Hernaka
Speaker 1: or of the Horas, that is good if it's embraced
Speaker 1: in the right way. And so it's all about channeling
Speaker 1: the martial spirit to do what is good and what
Speaker 1: is noble. Then this is a very important lesson that
Speaker 1: Ransom is going to have to learn, and that's going
Speaker 1: to come up in very clear term when we get
Speaker 1: to Perilandra, And if you already read that story, then
Speaker 1: you know what that might look like. And so what
Speaker 1: we see is Ransom starting to develop a positive relationship
Speaker 1: with the martial influence. And then of course we get
Speaker 1: to the actual hunt. We're told something long sleeping in
Speaker 1: the blood awoke in Ransom. It did not seem impossible
Speaker 1: at this moment that even he might be the Hanakraus layer,
Speaker 1: that the fame of Haman Hanakraput might be handed down
Speaker 1: to posterity in this world that knew no other man.
Speaker 1: And so again we get this idea that the air
Speaker 1: of Mars is doing something in Ransom, that it's ennobling
Speaker 1: him that is causing him to undergo this transformation to
Speaker 1: become more like the ruler of the planet, just as
Speaker 1: we see with the children in Narnia as they become
Speaker 1: ennobled and more asland like through the Air of Narnia.
Speaker 1: And then of course, after the hunt, a hooyah shot
Speaker 1: and dies, and then Ransom finally begins to answer the
Speaker 1: summons of Malelvil and this is where he encounters Augrey
Speaker 1: the Soorn, And I'm not going to read through all
Speaker 1: this right now, but he starts to talk about the Aldeala,
Speaker 1: about these beings that are just kind of on the
Speaker 1: edge of Ransom's perception. There are obviously some kind of
Speaker 1: angelic or at least semi angelic beings that are doing
Speaker 1: the will of Oyarsum, but Ransom really doesn't have a
Speaker 1: firm category for understanding what they are. And Augray starts
Speaker 1: to describe them as being these agents that kind of
Speaker 1: appear as light, but in reality there's something more real,
Speaker 1: and I think this is tied to what Ransom was
Speaker 1: meditating on before, about something being even more brilliant than
Speaker 1: light itself. And there's this wonder about Okay, do are
Speaker 1: the Eldeala around on Earth? And maybe Ransom has just
Speaker 1: never perceived them. He's not really sure, but Augrey says
Speaker 1: it's kind of weird that the Aldeala don't seem to
Speaker 1: be on Earth, and then Ransom, or thinking this through,
Speaker 1: says of that, I am not certain. It had dawned
Speaker 1: on him that the recurrent human tradition of bright, elusive
Speaker 1: people sometimes appearing on the Earth Albs Davis and the like,
Speaker 1: might after all have another explanation than the anthropologists had
Speaker 1: yet given. True, it would turn the universe rather oddly
Speaker 1: inside out, but his experiences in the spaceship had prepared
Speaker 1: him for such operation, and so basically it kind of
Speaker 1: starts to conclude here that maybe these stories about fairies
Speaker 1: that we have are actually onto something, maybe they're speaking
Speaker 1: to something real. However, this wouldn't only turn everything inside
Speaker 1: out because of some of these meditations he's having on
Speaker 1: kind of what reality really is and about the kind
Speaker 1: of analogies of light and existence and all that. You know,
Speaker 1: that's kind of mind blowing itself, but also turns things
Speaker 1: inside out by giving a quasi physical explanation of what
Speaker 1: we think of as being these fantastical, illusory realities. And
Speaker 1: so this is a continuation of this breakdown between the
Speaker 1: mundane and the fantastical. Now, next, before he leaves Augury's cave,
Speaker 1: he is able to use this telescope like instrum in
Speaker 1: order to look on Earth, and Ransom realizes it was
Speaker 1: all there in that little disk London, Athens, Jerusalem, Shakespeare.
Speaker 1: There everyone had lived and everything had happened, and there,
Speaker 1: presumably his pack was still lying in the porch of
Speaker 1: an empty house near Stirk. Yes, he said, dully to
Speaker 1: the sworn, that is my world. It was the bleakest
Speaker 1: moment in all of his travels. Now, why is this
Speaker 1: the bleakest moment one hand? I mean, he's looking at home.
Speaker 1: You think that might be kind of enlivening to him,
Speaker 1: But it's so bleak in that he begins to recognize
Speaker 1: that this world that holds all, or I guess at
Speaker 1: least nearly all of human history, is so small.
Speaker 2: It is limited.
Speaker 1: It is not the full story, and that has a
Speaker 1: kind of disquieting feel to it, to know that things
Speaker 1: might not be quite as significant as we once thought.
Speaker 1: But of course, through this whole journey he's going to
Speaker 1: recognize that the earth actually has far more significance than
Speaker 1: he realized. And this reminds me of mere Christianity, where
Speaker 1: Lewis writes, nothing in you that has not died will
Speaker 1: ever be raised from the dead. Look for yourself and
Speaker 1: you will find the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage,
Speaker 1: ruin and decay. But look for Christ and you will
Speaker 1: find him and with him everything else thrown in. And
Speaker 1: so this is a fairly common theme in Lewis's writing,
Speaker 1: the idea that you have to give yourself away in
Speaker 1: order to find yourself, that becoming an authentic individual is
Speaker 1: about engaging authentically with love. And what love does, what
Speaker 1: real love does, is it causes us to open ourselves up,
Speaker 1: to become more expansive, to give ourselves over toward that
Speaker 1: which is lovely, and in so doing we ourselves become lovely.
Speaker 2: But before you.
Speaker 1: Get there, you have to fall into this self denial.
Speaker 1: You have to enter into a kind of death before
Speaker 1: you can enter into life. Keep that in mind, especially
Speaker 1: as we get to Paralandrum right now. Eventually he makes
Speaker 1: his way to the court of Oyarsa. And again I'm
Speaker 1: not gonna read all this, but you know, Oyarsa kind
Speaker 1: of reveals this cosmic history. It seems pretty clear to
Speaker 1: us if you have any kind of, you know, Christian
Speaker 1: understanding of cosmic history, the Oarsa of Mars is some
Speaker 1: kind of angel, some kind of angelic like reality. And
Speaker 1: this fits in nicely with Lewis's medievalism. Remember I talked
Speaker 1: about the significance of the angels and how some angels
Speaker 1: are responsible for moving the planets, and so Oyarsa fits
Speaker 1: nicely within this medieval model. But ultimately Oyarsa is more
Speaker 1: of a class or a title, and so he's talking
Speaker 1: to the Oarsa of Mars. There's also an Oyarsa of Earth,
Speaker 1: the bent one, one who turned away from the fellowship
Speaker 1: that all these oars who have with each other. And
Speaker 1: that's why we have a silent planet, because the oars
Speaker 1: of our planet is confined to this location. And so
Speaker 1: really what Earth is is something like the prison of
Speaker 1: the bent One, and we tend to take on that
Speaker 1: influence that is pressed onto us at every turn and
Speaker 1: then to really drive in what's going on here. Oarsa
Speaker 1: talks about how maleldl, which surely is Christ, wrestled with
Speaker 1: the bent one on earth. But Oyasha doesn't really know
Speaker 1: much about this, and it is a thing that we
Speaker 1: desire to look into. And this is pulling straight from scripture.
Speaker 1: The fact that angels desire to look into the realities
Speaker 1: of the Gospel and Lewis really gives us a pretty
Speaker 1: strong indicator of what it is that we're talking about.
Speaker 2: Just in case we missed it.
Speaker 1: Ayarsa talks about, you know, how Ransom has been so afraid,
Speaker 1: and Ransom confesses that is true, Ayarsa. Bent creatures are
Speaker 1: full of fears. But I'm here now and ready to
Speaker 1: know your will with me. And so really we see
Speaker 1: the fruit of this conversion that Ransom has experienced, and
Speaker 1: so he recognizes bent creatures are full of fears. And
Speaker 1: so those who are ungrounded in reality, well, they don't
Speaker 1: have any ground to stand on, they don't have any foundation.
Speaker 1: They're insecure, they're latching themselves onto moving fortunes instead of
Speaker 1: grounding themselves in the goodness of reality itself. And so
Speaker 1: bent creatures are full of fears that are full of anxieties.
Speaker 1: But now he is here securely, ready to know what
Speaker 1: it is that Oyarsa wants with him. And Oarsa says
Speaker 1: that there are two things that I wanted to ask
Speaker 1: of your race. First, I must know why you come
Speaker 1: here so much is my duty to my world. And secondly,
Speaker 1: I wish to hear a Thochandra and a melodictle strange
Speaker 1: wars there with the bent one, for that, as I
Speaker 1: have said, it is a thing we desire to look into.
Speaker 1: So again we get this biblical language repeated that Oarsa
Speaker 1: longs to know more about this gospel story that's taken
Speaker 1: place on earth. And then again, I'm not gonna read
Speaker 1: this whole passage, but I do just think it's very
Speaker 1: interesting and kind of amusing. When Western divine are pulled
Speaker 1: into the court. At first, Ransom doesn't recognize them. It
Speaker 1: seems strange. They are like misshapen creatures, And eventually he
Speaker 1: realizes what they are, and so we really get the
Speaker 1: sense that he's seeing, as it says, here almost with
Speaker 1: malacho and eyes. And so he's really become immersed in
Speaker 1: this world. He's really learned to get outside of his
Speaker 1: earthly perspective. He's become more expansive in his perspective, more
Speaker 1: expansive in his vision. I remember I talked about how
Speaker 1: real love, that the right kind of love, right, the
Speaker 1: right kind of philosophy, which is the love of wisdom,
Speaker 1: causes us to become more expansive, to give ourselves over
Speaker 1: to greater and greater realities, and then greater realities tend
Speaker 1: to return the favor, making us more real. I think
Speaker 1: that's what's happening in this scene. And I love the
Speaker 1: scene where Ransom's providing a translation of Weston to Oyarsum.
Speaker 1: It's a way of really demonstrating the sophistry, the empty rhetoric,
Speaker 1: the absurdity of Weston's arguments, despite the fact that he
Speaker 1: uses very grandiose language here. And so you know, Weston
Speaker 1: says to you, it may seem a vulgar robber, but
Speaker 1: I bear on my shoulders the destiny of the human race.
Speaker 1: Your tribal life, with its stone age weapons and beehive huts,
Speaker 1: is primitive coracles and elementary social structures, has nothing to
Speaker 1: compare with our civilization, with our science, medicine and law,
Speaker 1: our armies, our architecture, our commerce, and our transport system,
Speaker 1: which is rapidly annihilating space and time. Our right to
Speaker 1: supersede you is the right of the higher over the lower.
Speaker 1: And then Ransom translates this by saying, among us, Oyarsa,
Speaker 1: there's a kind of cano who will take other Hena's
Speaker 1: food and things when they are not looking. He says
Speaker 1: he is not an ordinary one of that kind. In
Speaker 1: other words, he absolutely is a robber, but I mean
Speaker 1: not an ordinary one, as if that's somehow ennobling. And
Speaker 1: then I think the hole back and forth is just
Speaker 1: worth going over a few times, bothes keep going. So
Speaker 1: Oyarsa gives this rebuke to Weston. He says, strange said, Oarsa,
Speaker 1: you do not love any one of your race. You
Speaker 1: would have let me kill Ransom. You do not love
Speaker 1: the mind of your race, nor the body. Any kind
Speaker 1: of creature will please you if only it is begotten
Speaker 1: by your kin, as they now are. It seems to me,
Speaker 1: thick one, that what you really love is no completed creature,
Speaker 1: but the very seed itself, for that is all that
Speaker 1: is left. And so Oyarsa recognizes that. Weston talks about
Speaker 1: how he's serving the advancement of humanity that he has
Speaker 1: a great love for humanity. Yet we've seen that he
Speaker 1: actually has no love for any particular humans. He mistreats
Speaker 1: people for his scientific experiments. He was more than willing
Speaker 1: to sacrifice ransom when he thought Oyarsa was going to
Speaker 1: consume him or something. And so he doesn't actually care
Speaker 1: for any individual people, any individual humans, despite the fact
Speaker 1: that he claims to have this great love for humanity.
Speaker 1: And so Yarsa demonstrates this absurdity that beneath all of
Speaker 1: his speech is really this diabolical absurdity. But of course
Speaker 1: Weston is not willing to engage in this kind of
Speaker 1: authentic conversation, and so he says tell him, said Weston,
Speaker 1: when he had been made to understand this, that I
Speaker 1: don't pretend to be a metaphysician. I have not come
Speaker 1: here to top logic. If he cannot understand as apparently
Speaker 1: you can't either anything so fundamental as a man's loyalty
Speaker 1: to humanity, I can't make him understand it. And here
Speaker 1: Lewis is very clearly rebuking the science philosophy complex, where
Speaker 1: people will make all these claims the name of science,
Speaker 1: then you start to actually question them on philosophical terms
Speaker 1: and make them move toward more of a coherent framework. Well,
Speaker 1: now suddenly that they just back up and refuse to
Speaker 1: engage in philosophy. I think if Stephen Hawking saying that
Speaker 1: philosophy is dead because it's been superseded by science, despite
Speaker 1: the fact that that itself is a philosophical claim, and
Speaker 1: as if we were missing the point in the conclusion,
Speaker 1: when Ransom finally makes it back to Earth, and now
Speaker 1: we get this PostScript, we're told that we have also
Speaker 1: evidence increasing almost daily, that Western or the force or
Speaker 1: forces behind Western, will play a very important part in
Speaker 1: the events of the next few centuries, and unless we
Speaker 1: prevent them a very disastrous one. We do not mean
Speaker 1: that they're likely to invade Mars. Our cry is not
Speaker 1: merely hands off Malachandr. The dangers to be feared are
Speaker 1: not planetary, but cosmic, or at least solar, and they
Speaker 1: are not temporal but eternal. And so in case we
Speaker 1: missed it, Lewis comes right out and basically says that
Speaker 1: this stuff is real. The threat that Weston poses is
Speaker 1: a real threat that we have to deal with, that
Speaker 1: we must deal with, that we will inescapably deal with
Speaker 1: or at least it will deal with us if nothing else.
Speaker 1: And of course what this force or forces behind Weston
Speaker 1: are will become more evident in the next story. Now,
Speaker 1: in the final bit of the PostScript, Lewis says, now
Speaker 1: that Weston has shut the door, the way to the
Speaker 1: planets lies through the past. If there is to be
Speaker 1: any more space traveling, will have to be time traveling
Speaker 1: as well. Now, this is likely connected to the origin
Speaker 1: story for this series, which I probably should have talked
Speaker 1: about earlier on. But in any case, Lewis and Tolkien
Speaker 1: we're talking about how there weren't enough stories that they
Speaker 1: wanted to read being written, and so they were going
Speaker 1: to do it themselves, and they decided that they wanted
Speaker 1: a space travel story and a time travel story, and
Speaker 1: so they flipped a coin. Lewis got space, Tolkien got time. Now,
Speaker 1: as often happened, Tolkien's literary commitment never actually came to fruition.
Speaker 1: I mean, it eventually became The Lost Road, which was
Speaker 1: not publishing its own right, but did serve an important
Speaker 1: role in the formation of Tolkien's Legendarium. But nonetheless, I
Speaker 1: think that Lewis here is really trying to set up
Speaker 1: Tolkien's work that really just never came to be. However,
Speaker 1: Lewis himself, in his first attempt at a sequel to
Speaker 1: Out of the Side on the Planet, did indeed write
Speaker 1: a time travel story, and this is known as The
Speaker 1: Dark Tower. Now, this is an incomplete manuscript. Likely it
Speaker 1: was never finished, or perhaps we lost some of it,
Speaker 1: not really sure entirely, but regardless, we have a good
Speaker 1: portion of this story and I would recommend picking it up.
Speaker 1: You can get the book The Dark Tower and other stories,
Speaker 1: and so this contains what we have from the Dark Tower,
Speaker 1: this first attempt at a sequel to Out of the
Speaker 1: Silent Planet, which really does focus on time travel. It's
Speaker 1: kind of weird, it's very dark, but I still think
Speaker 1: it's worth reading. Maybe once you've finished the Ransom series
Speaker 1: at least one time around, it's worth going back to this.
Speaker 1: Now it's kind of frustrating, and that it is interesting,
Speaker 1: it's fascinating, it's gripping. However, it does cut off pretty abruptly,
Speaker 1: and so that just kind of is what it is.
Speaker 1: But nonetheless it's worth reading, as well as the other
Speaker 1: short stories that we do have in completion that are
Speaker 1: included in this collection. Here and so it's worth checking out.
Speaker 1: Maybe we can talk about the Dark Tower a little
Speaker 1: bit if that's something that you're interested in. But that
Speaker 1: concludes this current discussion of Out of the Silent Planet.
Speaker 1: I hope that this was useful for you. If you
Speaker 1: have any questions about anything that I discussed or simply
Speaker 1: did anything in the story or about the story, please
Speaker 1: let me know. The best way to do that would
Speaker 1: be to chime in on the discord channel as well
Speaker 1: as to bring it to our live conversations.
Speaker 2: But of course, if you.
Speaker 1: Let me know about something that you're wondering about ahead
Speaker 1: of time, then I'll be able to look into a
Speaker 1: little bit and give more of an informed response in
Speaker 1: the live conversation. But that's it for now, and so
Speaker 1: let's go ahead and start traveling further up and further
Speaker 1: in with Parilandra. Thank you for listening, and thank you
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Speaker 1: my courses that begin within that term, which at this
Speaker 1: point includes Plato Stoicism until we have Faces, the Elder
Speaker 1: Scrolls in Philosophy, and the Silmarillion. So I hope to
Speaker 1: see you around the fellowship. But no matter what, I
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Speaker 2: But until then, god speed,