Speaker 1: The Low and welcome to Mythic Mind, where we pursue
Speaker 1: wisdom in the past between primary secondary worlds. I'm your host,
Speaker 1: Andrew Snyder, and I'm always grateful.
Speaker 2: For your company.
Speaker 1: Today, I'll bring you something a little bit different. As
Speaker 1: I mentioned last time, I'm going to post some interviews
Speaker 1: and some group chats here for a bit until I
Speaker 1: get going with the next main season. Now, I recently
Speaker 1: finished up my first public facing study on the fiction
Speaker 1: and philosophy of C. S. Lewis, and a few of
Speaker 1: the participants from that course have come back together so
Speaker 1: that we could discuss C. S. Lewis's Ransom series. Now,
Speaker 1: in this conversation, we cover all three books out of
Speaker 1: the Silent Planet, Perilandra and I Hideous Strength. And if
Speaker 1: you've never read these books before, well you definitely need
Speaker 1: to because they are They're incredibly profound, incredibly timely, and
Speaker 1: it's largely because they're timeless, but they also do specifically
Speaker 1: particularly relate to a lot of things happening in our
Speaker 1: current age, and of course that are very well written,
Speaker 1: as you would expect given the author. Know that there
Speaker 1: are going to be some spoilers in this episode, and
Speaker 1: so be warned about that if that bothers you. But honestly,
Speaker 1: I'm really not too concerned about spoilers byself, not like
Speaker 1: I used to be. Cus Lewis explains in I think
Speaker 1: it's on stories that the best stories are not the
Speaker 1: ones carried by anticipation of the plot, but by familiarity.
Speaker 1: The more familiarity you have with good stories, with a
Speaker 1: good story, the more profundity is able to present itself clearly,
Speaker 1: the further up and the further in you are able
Speaker 1: to go. And so make of that what you will. Really,
Speaker 1: the spoilers probably aren't that terrible anyways, as we discuss
Speaker 1: a lot of material in a relatively little amount of time,
Speaker 1: which means that there's a lot that we don't discuss here.
Speaker 1: But in any case, I really enjoy this conversation, and
Speaker 1: I hope that you do as well. All Right, So
Speaker 1: here we go, all right, So welcome to the reunion
Speaker 1: of the Floxy and Fiction of C. S. Lewis. So
Speaker 1: we have here a few of the participants from that course.
Speaker 1: You know who I am, But let's just go ahead
Speaker 1: and start off by going around the room. Here. Just
Speaker 1: give us your name and your favorite C. S. Lewis book,
Speaker 1: and that way everybody can associate your name with your boys. Chase,
Speaker 1: why don't you go in and kick us off?
Speaker 3: That's my name is Chase. My favorite C. S. Lewis
Speaker 3: book is typically the last one that I've read, but
Speaker 3: I think through this class Ah the Great Divorce, and
Speaker 3: in terms of Narnia, like Silver Chair, we're definitely up
Speaker 3: there as some of the top other than the Ransom trilogy.
Speaker 1: Coo cool, good choices, so basically everything and not a
Speaker 1: bad answer when it comes to Lewis.
Speaker 2: Catherine, Hey there, I'm Katherine. I think my favorite is
Speaker 2: still Till We Have Faces. That's got to be tops.
Speaker 2: Even in conjunction with everything that we've read. It's been
Speaker 2: cool to see his growth as an author. Until We
Speaker 2: Have Faces seems like it's one of the more sophisticated ones.
Speaker 2: It's cool to imagine where he would have gone next after.
Speaker 1: That one good, fantastic, and of course that was Lewis's
Speaker 1: choice as well, at least when it comes to his novels,
Speaker 1: and I'm very sympathetic to that. Olivia, I'm Olivia.
Speaker 4: I'm joined here by my firit Sydney, who was very
Speaker 4: opinionated and unfortunately, will be sharing his opinions. My favorite
Speaker 4: book is Till We Have Faces. That was my intro
Speaker 4: to Lewis when I was a teenager, and it's still
Speaker 4: my favorite book of all time.
Speaker 1: Good fantastic, and spending the bird here. Talking about Lewis
Speaker 1: makes you think of that part of Pera Landro where
Speaker 1: he says word exactly where we should be between our
Speaker 1: elder brothers, the angels and the animals are playfellows andingesters.
Speaker 1: So it's a it's a good good Paralyandrian nod there.
Speaker 5: Jackie, Hi, I'm Jackie, And my favorite of C. S.
Speaker 5: Lewis's fiction is probably That Hideous Strength or The Horse
Speaker 5: and His Boy.
Speaker 1: Good fantastic.
Speaker 6: David Hi, Yeah, I'm David Man. Yeah, it's it's really
Speaker 6: hard to pick. I'm kind of like Chase, but I'm
Speaker 6: going to say Parlandra. Just on reading it again for
Speaker 6: this course, just the writing in there, just some really
Speaker 6: good descriptive, expressive writing, and just the theology in there
Speaker 6: really really gripped me this time. So I'll say that
Speaker 6: for now.
Speaker 1: Another good choice, not like you can really go wrong,
Speaker 1: and I think that I also have to get mine too.
Speaker 1: Till we Have Faces I think that just demonstrates his
Speaker 1: most mature writing. We get a lot of the themes
Speaker 1: that we see in his earlier writing, as early as Ransom,
Speaker 1: but I think just brought to a deeper level, really
Speaker 1: brought more into that realm of myth where it's kind
Speaker 1: of more frustrating in that it's more difficult to walk
Speaker 1: away with a precise knowledge of exactly what he's doing.
Speaker 1: But you know he's doing something very profound, and I
Speaker 1: appreciate that mystery and that struggle to get our minds
Speaker 1: around it. But this is not an till we have
Speaker 1: faces episode. Today. We are here to primarily talk about
Speaker 1: the Ransom series and so out of the side on
Speaker 1: Planet Parilandra and that hideous strength. And I mean, of
Speaker 1: course some of your books might say the Space Trilogy
Speaker 1: on it, but as we're going to come to find,
Speaker 1: space is the wrong name. And so we're covering a
Speaker 1: lot of ground right now. I don't know how many
Speaker 1: hundreds of pages here, and so the purpose of this
Speaker 1: is not really to do a page by page or
Speaker 1: even chapter by chapter analysis. It's really just to talk
Speaker 1: about things that have stood out to us. So if
Speaker 1: you haven't read it, you have good reason to, although
Speaker 1: I mean warning there will be some spoilers here, but
Speaker 1: I think that this is really a neglected book or
Speaker 1: neglected series when it comes to Lewis, everybody knows him
Speaker 1: for Narnia, and for a lot of people, that's basically
Speaker 1: where it begins and where it ends. And it's not
Speaker 1: a bad place to begin an end. But there's a
Speaker 1: lot more to Lewis, a lot more you can go
Speaker 1: further up and further in. And so we're gonna start
Speaker 1: off by just providing brief plot summaries for refreshers for
Speaker 1: those of you who maybe haven't read this recently, and
Speaker 1: then we'll just talk about what we think is cool.
Speaker 1: So for Out of the Silent Planet, it begins with
Speaker 1: the philologist Ransom, who is walking down a road. We
Speaker 1: get some homages to Dante and that he's initially not
Speaker 1: even given a name, he's just called the Pedestrian. And
Speaker 1: he's walking down the road and he finds his way
Speaker 1: through the forest to this inn where he's given his
Speaker 1: first quest to go check on this lady's son. And
Speaker 1: so if she goes to find her son, and he
Speaker 1: ends up stumbling upon a couple scientists who are occupying
Speaker 1: a house previously owned by a woman named Alice. This
Speaker 1: is going to be Ransom's entry away into Wonderland, and
Speaker 1: so he meets up with Weston and Divine, these progressive
Speaker 1: take over the universe scientists types. They kidnap him and
Speaker 1: bring him off to Mars, where he really gets into
Speaker 1: the heart of the story. He goes through all these
Speaker 1: different Marshall experiences until finally he's brought up before the
Speaker 1: oyarsa of Mars, this angelic like figure, and then through
Speaker 1: this conversation he really just gets transformed. He really comes
Speaker 1: to embody the martial spirit. And then of course he's
Speaker 1: sent back home to get ready for his next quest.
Speaker 1: And as far as the significance of all of that,
Speaker 1: we'll probably get into some of that in our conversation.
Speaker 1: But like I said, we're just gonna go around the
Speaker 1: room here. Just tell us some things that stood out
Speaker 1: to you, maybe a quote that stood out to you,
Speaker 1: maybe a scene or a theme. You can get as
Speaker 1: specific or as broad as you want to. It can
Speaker 1: be really profound, or it can just be Chris, that
Speaker 1: was pretty cool moment. I'm okay you the way with that.
Speaker 1: We'll go in reverse order now, David what do you
Speaker 1: have for us?
Speaker 6: Well, one of the things I really like about Out
Speaker 6: of the Silent Planet is it it feels like Lewis
Speaker 6: has kind of set up some races who are rightly
Speaker 6: aligned with God to show how bent we are in
Speaker 6: relation to God. In fact, you know, that's the term
Speaker 6: that the books use to talk about the ones from Earth,
Speaker 6: is that we're bent. So all of the questions and
Speaker 6: the fears that Ransom has when he is there on Malachandra,
Speaker 6: they just kind of reveal what we don't understand and
Speaker 6: the ways that we our selfish devotions, our desire to,
Speaker 6: you know, to have more because something was good, we
Speaker 6: always want more of it instead of the right amount,
Speaker 6: or we want it too early, or we want it
Speaker 6: too long. And I thought there was really profound statements,
Speaker 6: especially in his conversation with the Horosa and with the
Speaker 6: Oarsa at the end, that just kind of make you
Speaker 6: realize how we should be seeing our place in the
Speaker 6: universe and the life that God has given us. So
Speaker 6: it's pretty thoughtful. I think people tend to think Perilandra
Speaker 6: is the more thoughtful book, but there's really some good
Speaker 6: stuff to get out of Out of the Silent Planet.
Speaker 5: As well.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they're most definitely is. Yeah. I've mentioned this many
Speaker 1: times throughout that this class referred to this George McDonald
Speaker 1: quote when he says that the philosopher is someone who
Speaker 1: lives in the thought of things, and the Christian is
Speaker 1: someone who lives in the thing themselves. And we very
Speaker 1: much see that play out in Ransom's progression from the philologists.
Speaker 1: He's a guy who works with words, he works with
Speaker 1: the idea of things. The sort of word is, it's
Speaker 1: an abstraction from concrete reality. But through his journeys to
Speaker 1: the heavens, not space, but the heavens, something that's occupy,
Speaker 1: it's something as substantial. He comes to walk in the
Speaker 1: things themselves. And you know, this is somebody who is
Speaker 1: a professing Christian from the beginning, and so it's not
Speaker 1: necessarily a conversion experience, so to speak. But we very
Speaker 1: much get this further up and further in idea that
Speaker 1: he's being brought into a greater degree of reality. He's
Speaker 1: coming to walk among the things that he used to
Speaker 1: only talk about. And so, yeah, I think that's just
Speaker 1: a great journey of being brought into the context that
Speaker 1: he already knows but doesn't yet know, Yeah, good points, Chase,
Speaker 1: what do you have for us?
Speaker 3: Yeah, so.
Speaker 4: Definitely.
Speaker 3: I think it does a remarkable job just like introducing
Speaker 3: us to like minieval view of cosmology, and it breaks
Speaker 3: this kind of free of the restraints to view space
Speaker 3: like not as a vacuum, but it's like a vacuum
Speaker 3: devoid of life, but actually something to like give us
Speaker 3: wonder and if you basically the heavens. So that was
Speaker 3: that's pretty cool. I really loved the scene with Ransom,
Speaker 3: just having that realization alone and just how it doesn't
Speaker 3: even compare to what academics and scientists say. I think C. S.
Speaker 3: Lewis really kind of like stood in the face of
Speaker 3: like the modernity and like production of everything down to
Speaker 3: like such materialism with this kind of quote from Douglas
Speaker 3: Wilson about it. He said, for moderns, the universe is
Speaker 3: a bunch of nothing. In contrast to this, for Lewis,
Speaker 3: the cosmos was teeming with life, love, and color. It
Speaker 3: was his goal to bring a fundamental reversal in the
Speaker 3: minds of his readers from empty to fool, from black
Speaker 3: to color, fool, from dead to alive. I thought that
Speaker 3: really summarize a lot of the book there.
Speaker 1: Yeah, were you pulling that from the preface to Deeper
Speaker 1: Heaven any chance?
Speaker 3: No, it was from his lecture on it. Oh kind
Speaker 3: of dog whist wolves.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Okay, I'm sure it's same kind of material because
Speaker 1: he wrote the preference to Christina Hale's Deeper Heaven. And yeah,
Speaker 1: he talks about there how what we describe as space
Speaker 1: or the outer darkness. I mean, that's biblically description of
Speaker 1: hell as opposed to the heavens that we used to
Speaker 1: see when we look out beyond the sphere of the earth.
Speaker 1: And yeah, and that points to the quotation that I
Speaker 1: wanted to bring. So I'll go and throw that in here,
Speaker 1: and just gets to exactly what you're bringing up here.
Speaker 1: This is kind of long, but I think that is
Speaker 1: just so essential to getting at the heart of what's
Speaker 1: going on here. And so at this point, Ransom had
Speaker 1: just been kidnapped and brought up to what we call space.
Speaker 1: But he starts to have this enlightenment this and I
Speaker 1: mean that word very intentionally, in enlightenment that the light
Speaker 1: of the sun, the light of the heavens, is filling
Speaker 1: his soul and broadening him to partake of this heavenly context,
Speaker 1: and so it says here but ransom. As time war
Speaker 1: On became a caware of another more spiritual cause for
Speaker 1: his progressive lightning and exaltation of heart. A nightmare long
Speaker 1: engendered in the modern mind by the mythology that follows
Speaker 1: in the wake of science, was falling off him. He
Speaker 1: had read of space at the back of his thinking
Speaker 1: for years, had lurked the dismal fancy of the black,
Speaker 1: cold vacuity, the utter deadness which was supposed to separate
Speaker 1: the worlds. He had not known how much it affected
Speaker 1: him until now now that the very name space seemed
Speaker 1: to blasphemous libel. For this imperian ocean of radiance in
Speaker 1: which they swam, he felt life pouring into him from
Speaker 1: it every moment. How indeed should it be otherwise, Since
Speaker 1: out of this ocean the worlds, in all their life,
Speaker 1: had come. He had thought it barren. He saw now
Speaker 1: that it was the womb of worlds, whose blazing and
Speaker 1: innumerable offspring looked down nightly, even upon the Earth with
Speaker 1: so many eyes, and here with 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 climbs out lie where day
Speaker 1: never shuts his eye up in the broad fields of
Speaker 1: the sky. He quoted Milton's words to himself lovingly at
Speaker 1: this time and often, and I think that that right
Speaker 1: there just encompasses so much of what this book is
Speaker 1: doing and helping us to break free from the disenchantment
Speaker 1: of modernity, or maybe she even say the bewitchment of modernity.
Speaker 1: Right this brings us into the underland with the witch
Speaker 1: in the silver chair. That is the modernity, is the
Speaker 1: decontextualization of human experience and the discarded image. Where Lewis
Speaker 1: talks about medieval and Renaissance cosmology and just kind of
Speaker 1: their view of life, he makes the point that a
Speaker 1: modern man, and I'm sure that many of us have
Speaker 1: probably had some experience like this, but a modern man
Speaker 1: will go outside at night and look up at the
Speaker 1: vastness of what we call space and feel a sense
Speaker 1: of just anxiety or dread. We look up at space
Speaker 1: and we see a question mark. We said that if
Speaker 1: that's very different than the medieval man who would go
Speaker 1: out on a starry night and look up at the
Speaker 1: heavens and not find a question mark, but find an answer,
Speaker 1: find substance in which his mind can rest. He would
Speaker 1: look up and see the perfect order of the heavens
Speaker 1: as something to emulate, something that can bring order to
Speaker 1: his own life, not something that brings just the emptiness
Speaker 1: of space. And so this this medieval view of looking
Speaker 1: at the cosmos, looking at our place in the cosmos,
Speaker 1: and it's anything but dark. It's teeming with radiance and
Speaker 1: with life and with order. There's a profound hope and
Speaker 1: a profound beauty in the medieval view of looking at
Speaker 1: the world that is simply lacking altogether through our modern eyes.
Speaker 1: And so that's what I most appreciate about out of
Speaker 1: the side of the planet that I mean, there are
Speaker 1: all kinds of profound points that he's making, but this
Speaker 1: isn't even really a point. It's more of just an
Speaker 1: experience of a broadening context for your life. The smaller
Speaker 1: you are and the more the higher that you're able
Speaker 1: to go, well, the more hope you can have, the
Speaker 1: more aspiration that you can have. That there's nothing freeing
Speaker 1: about being told that there's no up or down, no
Speaker 1: left to right, that we're simply a rock floating in
Speaker 1: the vastness of space. And that's really the rebuke that's
Speaker 1: given to especially Weston, but also Divine. I mean, Divine
Speaker 1: doesn't really care about anything other than money. But you know,
Speaker 1: Weston has all these these hopes of progress, but he
Speaker 1: has no direction to determine what progress even means, whereas
Speaker 1: Rainsom is going to experience what real progress actually looks like.
Speaker 1: And what it looks like is relating yourself to the eternal.
Speaker 1: All right, I just mind a lot to go too
Speaker 1: long there, Olivia and your bird? What do you have?
Speaker 4: There is so much in this book, Like David said,
Speaker 4: it's more sophisticated than a lot of people give it
Speaker 4: credit for. It is, on the surface like much more
Speaker 4: of a traditional like adventure story, more of a traditional
Speaker 4: sci fi, which the series really isn't, but you get
Speaker 4: that bid more in this book. My favorite scene comes
Speaker 4: near the end of the book where Ransom and then
Speaker 4: Wesson Divine come and meet with Oyarisa, and there's so
Speaker 4: much just in that scene. You know. I love the
Speaker 4: conversation between Ransom and Yarsa and Ransom is afraid of
Speaker 4: Aarsa and noyarsas him why and he's explaining that, well,
Speaker 4: I can't see you, and you know you're so different
Speaker 4: from me, and Ayara says like, well, those aren't reasons
Speaker 4: to be afraid. I love the line when Yaris is
Speaker 4: explaining why Earth, why Pelchondra is the silent planet, and
Speaker 4: he says that they have, you know, they've kind of
Speaker 4: heard bits and pieces of what's been going on there.
Speaker 4: And he says that that there are stories among us
Speaker 4: that he has taken strange counsel, he being melel Dil
Speaker 4: and dared terrible things wrestling with the bent one in Polchandra.
Speaker 4: But of this we know less than you. It is
Speaker 4: a thing we desire to look into, and that, of
Speaker 4: course echoes what Peter says in his first epistle. He's
Speaker 4: describing the Gospel and says that it is things into
Speaker 4: which angels long to look. So here we really get
Speaker 4: you the other side of that story, from the angelic perspective,
Speaker 4: which is fascinating. Another like little interchange in that conversation
Speaker 4: comes when Olearisa is you explaining that he has uh
Speaker 4: that his servants. You know, we're watching Ransom and the
Speaker 4: others as they were in their spacecraft coming through deep
Speaker 4: heaven and ransom us, have you servants out in the heavens?
Speaker 4: And Oorisa says where else? There is nowhere else, which
Speaker 4: really distills that you with that view of deep heaven,
Speaker 4: like the others were describing, where really heaven is what's
Speaker 4: abundantly filled with life and things, and from the Elderl's perspective,
Speaker 4: what we see as worlds are really just like pin
Speaker 4: pricks of almost nothingness in the fabric of deep heaven.
Speaker 4: And then of course Weston and Divine come in and
Speaker 4: it's a scene with Weston trying to talk to Aarsa,
Speaker 4: but he thinks that, you know, Ayarsa is really a
Speaker 4: witch doctor projecting his voice. So he looks around and
Speaker 4: he tries to figure out who's this witch doctor, who
Speaker 4: is you know, ventriloquising, and he sees this elderly heirass
Speaker 4: who is you know, falling asleep, and that scene and
Speaker 4: that you know of detail is fantastic. And the way Weston,
Speaker 4: not really knowing that language, tries to speak to to Yarsa,
Speaker 4: he really speaks as a stereotypical you know, savage, as
Speaker 4: he would say, in trying to communicate with the Malachandrians
Speaker 4: professing to be wise, he's become a fool. But then
Speaker 4: you really see the absurdity of his viewpoint once once
Speaker 4: he gets to his speech where he says, well, you know,
Speaker 4: I don't have enough of your language to say it.
Speaker 4: So then Ransom translates, and then you see what Western
Speaker 4: says in English parallel with Ransom's translation, and it really
Speaker 4: breaks it down from a heavenly perspective, and you begin
Speaker 4: to appreciate just how absurd Western's viewpoint is. And as
Speaker 4: a Yarisa points out, Western, he's willing to sacrifice Ransom.
Speaker 4: He doesn't care for any one man. It's just this
Speaker 4: abstract view of humanity that he sees he's striving for
Speaker 4: and fighting for. So we already start to see the
Speaker 4: seeds of the abolition of man that you will come
Speaker 4: to fruition and that hideous strength.
Speaker 1: Good. Yeah, you just covered a lot of really important points.
Speaker 1: And so I don't even know how to respond to that,
Speaker 1: or even if I need to, but to just get
Speaker 1: at some of that, Yeah, I think that speech or
Speaker 1: that translation scene where west End is is very pompously
Speaker 1: giving this great or grace not the right word, but
Speaker 1: you know, great in the sense of grand robust, this
Speaker 1: proud speech about progress and he's doing all these things.
Speaker 1: And then Ransom translates like, well, he says that he's
Speaker 1: a robber, but not like normal robbers. It's just like
Speaker 1: all the rhetoric gets stripped down to nothingness. And you know,
Speaker 1: we also calls him on this as well, and he
Speaker 1: says that, Okay, you keep saying that you're fighting for
Speaker 1: the progress of man, but you can't even define what
Speaker 1: man is. He says that you love the seed, but
Speaker 1: not the fulfillment. You love progress itself, but you don't
Speaker 1: have any goal that you're actually progressing toward. And if
Speaker 1: that isn't the rebuttal that modern philosophy needs, and I
Speaker 1: don't know what is. It is so easy to talk
Speaker 1: about progress, and I deal with this all the time
Speaker 1: teaching my public university college students. Right everyone wants to
Speaker 1: call themselves a progressive. Then I say, Okay, what is
Speaker 1: it that we're progressing toward? I don't know. And so
Speaker 1: it just kind of falls apart because and this really
Speaker 1: gets to the abolish of the man which you referenced,
Speaker 1: because in a strictly empirical worldview, in a worldview that
Speaker 1: denies transcendent realities. Well, there is no such thing as good.
Speaker 1: There's not even such a thing as the form of humanity,
Speaker 1: although there is is stuff that moves. And when you
Speaker 1: just have a cosmos of stuff that moves, but there's
Speaker 1: no question of where ought things to move, you have
Speaker 1: no way of actually dealing with those questions. That all
Speaker 1: you get is just movement for the sake of movement.
Speaker 1: As Lewis says in a satirical evolutionary hymn, progresses what
Speaker 1: comes next, whatever that is. And so yeah, that's just
Speaker 1: a great rebuttal of Weston's empty modern progressivism. That there's
Speaker 1: no movement, is progress into a void, which of course
Speaker 1: is not progress at all. Cool, Catherine, what do you have?
Speaker 2: Hey there, let's see. Two things really stick out to me.
Speaker 2: One is the curiosity that Ransom as a character exhibits,
Speaker 2: and that seems to be something that saves him from
Speaker 2: a great deal of trouble throughout the story. His curiosity
Speaker 2: about the experience of being in space, I think preserves
Speaker 2: him from the animosity of Weston and Divine, and then
Speaker 2: when he runs away from them, when they actually land
Speaker 2: on Malacan, he is separated from everything that he knows
Speaker 2: for a good while, and then when he first meets
Speaker 2: maybe the best character in the book, when he first
Speaker 2: meets Hyawi, his curiosity is what rescues him from despair
Speaker 2: because he is a philologist and he suddenly realizes that
Speaker 2: he does have something in common with this other creature.
Speaker 2: And I think Lewis has a very important point here
Speaker 2: with curiosity and being aware of looking for connections. Where
Speaker 2: Weston and Devine didn't ask any questions, they assumed a
Speaker 2: great deal about what the Oyarsa wanted, and so they
Speaker 2: were prepared to bring another person down with them. They
Speaker 2: were prepared to offer a human sacrifice when instead that's
Speaker 2: not what the Oyarsa wanted at all whatsoever. And another
Speaker 2: thing that I love about the story as a whole
Speaker 2: is it's very classic for Lewis where everything is about inversion.
Speaker 2: Everything from the title to the expectation of what deep
Speaker 2: dark space will be. Everything is flipped on its head
Speaker 2: because you think we're going to the silent planet and
Speaker 2: we find.
Speaker 4: Out that we're wrong.
Speaker 2: We think that Heaven will be cold and dark, and
Speaker 2: instead Bransom describes how warm it is and how bright
Speaker 2: and filled with life it is. Right as Olivia was
Speaker 2: talking about. It's not dark and empty, it's in fact
Speaker 2: filled with life. It seems like it's the source of life.
Speaker 2: And that seems to be another medieval aspect for Lewis
Speaker 2: that's touching on this really classic trope. He probably learned
Speaker 2: about it from Chesterton because Chesterton talks about it in Orthodoxy.
Speaker 2: He talks about the need to leave home so that
Speaker 2: you can understand what home is. You can't love I
Speaker 2: think he refers to Islington. He says, you can't love
Speaker 2: Islington or know what it is until you have left
Speaker 2: and then come back. And that makes me think of
Speaker 2: Ransom when he looks at and he sees that little
Speaker 2: marble out from the window of this spaceship, and he
Speaker 2: asks what that is, and he's struck to realize that
Speaker 2: that is earth. That he's been taken off of his
Speaker 2: own home. But as far as that preparation, it seems
Speaker 2: like a lot of that maybe was not deliberately set
Speaker 2: up by Lewis, but it's there within the story that
Speaker 2: he's taken out of his home. He's given access to
Speaker 2: the old Solar language so that he can do things
Speaker 2: in Perlandra and so that he can emerge later on
Speaker 2: in that hideous strength and that medieval symmetry I think
Speaker 2: is really beautiful. And if you're looking for more out
Speaker 2: of just an adventure story, I would propose right that
Speaker 2: Lewis is doing that. He's asking you as a reader
Speaker 2: to consider, how can I invert my expectations?
Speaker 7: How have I.
Speaker 2: Believed that the world is one way when in fact
Speaker 2: it's the opposite, And that's just so crucial. I think
Speaker 2: that's a that's a theme throughout his fiction and his
Speaker 2: nonfiction is well. I think that's that's important for us
Speaker 2: as readers.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a great point. Yeah, he very often does
Speaker 1: do this inversion thing where he'll just suddenly reshape your
Speaker 1: understanding of obviously not even just the story, but your
Speaker 1: understanding of yourself, in your place in the world, in
Speaker 1: the cosmos, what human experience is, you know, And that
Speaker 1: very much relates to this further up further idea that
Speaker 1: we get in the Last Battle the most clearly out
Speaker 1: of any of his writing. But I remember there's a
Speaker 1: scene where at one point, okay, he's up in the
Speaker 1: heavens and he's sort of meditating on what all this means,
Speaker 1: reflecting on what it all means, and he's recognizing that
Speaker 1: he's now in a plane of reality that he once
Speaker 1: thought was empty. Now he recognizes it's more full than
Speaker 1: the world that he once knew. So then he thinks, well, okay,
Speaker 1: maybe if I go beyond the light of the sun
Speaker 1: or something of that nature, well maybe then I would
Speaker 1: be in the real space, the real nothingness. And he thought, well,
Speaker 1: a minute, what if there's something even more real than
Speaker 1: light itself? And so, what if, you know, beyond this
Speaker 1: realm of reality I'm experiencing now in the heavens, what
Speaker 1: if there's something even more real that I simply don't
Speaker 1: yet have categories for understanding. And so he recognizes, or
Speaker 1: least he hints at the suspicion that there's an even
Speaker 1: greater reality than the heavens. And so he is increasing
Speaker 1: the heavens context, moved further and further up, even beyond
Speaker 1: the cosmos, perhaps even to the imperion of God, which
Speaker 1: in the medieval cosmos is what's on the well going
Speaker 1: from the Earth out the far outskirts of reality. But
Speaker 1: from a more a better perspective, that actually is the
Speaker 1: center of reality, and it's Earth that's on the outskirts.
Speaker 1: I think That's an important point that a lot of
Speaker 1: times people moderns will look back on the medieval view
Speaker 1: of the cosmos and say, oh, the Medievals put Earth
Speaker 1: at the center of things because they thought they were
Speaker 1: so important. No, it's just the opposite. They really put
Speaker 1: themselves at the bottom of things. That when you're really
Speaker 1: looking with medieval eyes, you recognize that you are on
Speaker 1: the outskirts of existence, living down here on this rock.
Speaker 1: The real center is God. And that's something that's said
Speaker 1: explicitly in Perilandra that we're always looking for the center,
Speaker 1: but the center is Meleldel Blessed be He, and so
Speaker 1: God is the center. And so the more that we're
Speaker 1: moving away from what we tend to think of being
Speaker 1: the center, we're actually moving toward the true center, which
Speaker 1: then helps us to center the world that we know,
Speaker 1: which goes to what you're talking about about how that
Speaker 1: allows us to actually see our home once we've left
Speaker 1: it in the right way and come back to it
Speaker 1: in the right way. And we see that play out
Speaker 1: throughout the series. As Ransom becomes this bridge figure, he
Speaker 1: starts to recontextualize the side on planet through who he is.
Speaker 1: He starts to mediate the voice that it's meant to
Speaker 1: have coming from deep heaven. So he starts to recontextualize things,
Speaker 1: he starts to redeem things as he plays this priest
Speaker 1: like role. Cool, Jordan, I know you you jumped in
Speaker 1: a little bit late, and so go and tell us
Speaker 1: your favorite Lewis book and then something about Out the
Speaker 1: Silent Planet.
Speaker 7: So I think my favorite Lewis book is This is
Speaker 7: going to sound like a cop out, but it probably
Speaker 7: is true. Whichever one I'm reading at the present moment,
Speaker 7: I don't know. It's it's just too hard to pick.
Speaker 7: If you're gonna force me to do it, though, it's
Speaker 7: probably going to be It's probably going to be The Lion,
Speaker 7: the Witch, and the Wardrobe, I think. But Colin says,
Speaker 7: the Magician's nephew. What was the next question I've already forgotten?
Speaker 7: Oh introduced myself. Oh I'm Jordan. I'm a dad, husband,
Speaker 7: Lutheran pastor, chronic fiction enjoyer.
Speaker 1: And then what's something that you've enjoyed or something about
Speaker 1: Out of the Silent Planet.
Speaker 7: So a couple of things that kind of immediately came
Speaker 7: to mind is I really liked the focus on the language,
Speaker 7: how Ransom tries to learn the language of Malacandra. I've
Speaker 7: always sort of been fascinated with other languages, and it's
Speaker 7: neat to see his journey through that. I don't know
Speaker 7: if that has to do with, you know, kind of
Speaker 7: my early exposure to Tolkien and his languages, but I've
Speaker 7: always just kind of found language to be just kind
Speaker 7: of a fun thing to play with. And I really
Speaker 7: like how Lewis just kind of puts it out there
Speaker 7: for us to sort of work through it with him.
Speaker 7: That really drew me in the second thing that kind
Speaker 7: of stuck out to me, and this really carries over
Speaker 7: into the next couple of books too. It's sort of
Speaker 7: this idea of dominion, that is, who has the proper
Speaker 7: proper authority where you kind of see this with the
Speaker 7: division between the three species there on Malacandra, that each
Speaker 7: one has its own interests and expertise. I mean, even
Speaker 7: when Ransom wants to give al Gray the pocket watch,
Speaker 7: he turns it down and says that the fifful triggy
Speaker 7: would would have more use out of this, because then
Speaker 7: they could build more of them and give them to
Speaker 7: other folks on on the on Malacandra, I think that
Speaker 7: that idea of just the differences between the species and
Speaker 7: the way that they compliment one another is really kind
Speaker 7: of something interesting. Like I said that, I think it's
Speaker 7: going to carry through. So I guess I don't want
Speaker 7: to say too much more about the other two books
Speaker 7: since we haven't gotten there yet, but just the the
Speaker 7: the diversity of life on Malacandra, and yet how well
Speaker 7: it all works together, how ordered it is, speaks to
Speaker 7: really the order of the whole, the whole creation in
Speaker 7: his mind.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and so a lot to comment on that, although
Speaker 1: ILL try to be brief. Can we have a lot
Speaker 1: to cover tonight? But I agree that the it's very
Speaker 1: interesting having your protagonist be a philologist, something that I
Speaker 1: think that Lewis is one of the few people who
Speaker 1: can get away with doing that well. I really love
Speaker 1: one of my favorite scenes, just because I find it
Speaker 1: funny more than even profound, is when he first encounters
Speaker 1: the fross and he recognizes that it's speaking to him
Speaker 1: in a rational language, and he goes from being terrified
Speaker 1: to just thinking about how he's going to write some
Speaker 1: malacantry and grammar book. So he's just meditating on his
Speaker 1: philological word nerdery here instead of immediately dealing with the
Speaker 1: fact that he's communicating or an alien species at least
Speaker 1: alien to him, is trying to communicate with them, and
Speaker 1: so he's kind of lost that context. He's going back
Speaker 1: into just filology mood. And I just found it funny
Speaker 1: and very very lowis to me, and then I had
Speaker 1: more to say, but it totally fell in my head.
Speaker 1: So speaking of space, I guess, Zackie, what do you
Speaker 1: have for us?
Speaker 5: So I love the opening scene when Ransom ends up
Speaker 5: going to the house that once belonged to Alice and
Speaker 5: he has to climb the garden wall to get in,
Speaker 5: and then eventually he has this hallucination or dream featuring
Speaker 5: owls and some interesting questions that they pose to him,
Speaker 5: and this whole idea that's also prevalent in Chesterton's Orthodoxy,
Speaker 5: where he talks about how men are saying because they
Speaker 5: have one foot in reality and one foot in fairyland,
Speaker 5: or one foot in earth and one foot in fairy tales.
Speaker 5: And I can't help but think that maybe Lewis is
Speaker 5: referencing in this scene and the owls are asking Ransom
Speaker 5: who he is, and I think Ransom doesn't know who
Speaker 5: he is until maybe the end of this book, or
Speaker 5: at least doesn't understand himself very well. And we see
Speaker 5: over the course of this book he faces these incredible
Speaker 5: challenges and he goes on this wild adventure and he
Speaker 5: comes through it all at the end having faced several
Speaker 5: of his struggles and weaknesses, and he is stronger and
Speaker 5: more sure of himself and becomes this nearly angelic figure
Speaker 5: himself over the course of the trilogy. So it's just
Speaker 5: really interesting to see where he starts off and how
Speaker 5: that progresses through the course of this novel.
Speaker 1: Yeah good, and that vision that he has towards the
Speaker 1: beginning of the book is obviously very significant. Ransom has
Speaker 1: one foot in the known, one foot in the unknown,
Speaker 1: one foot in the walled garden, the other foot in ferry,
Speaker 1: I guess, or perhaps even the heavens, as he really
Speaker 1: does serve as this bridge figure, and that becomes a
Speaker 1: growing motif throughout this year, especially once we get to
Speaker 1: that hideous strength that he serves as this bridge figure
Speaker 1: between Earth and the heavens. Whereas in that vision western
Speaker 1: and divine, they go through this door into what for
Speaker 1: them really is space, because they don't find substance there.
Speaker 1: They're pushed back through the door back when they started.
Speaker 1: And that's because even though they do enter into this physically,
Speaker 1: they enter into the heavens spiritually existentially, they never really
Speaker 1: do they bring the silent planet to Malachandr, whereas Ransom
Speaker 1: learns how to contextualize himself within the society of Malacandra,
Speaker 1: which itself is contextualized within the heavens. And that brings
Speaker 1: us back to Jordan's point that I was going to
Speaker 1: respond to that fell out of my head but now
Speaker 1: came back. It was pushed back to the door, I guess.
Speaker 1: And so you know, he talked about how you've got
Speaker 1: this well ordered society, and I mean, this gives us
Speaker 1: a good point to say, it's all in Plato that
Speaker 1: right there, we're really getting the republic essentially, where we
Speaker 1: have these different aspects of civilization that have different niche roles,
Speaker 1: but they all work together as a unified whole. And
Speaker 1: so an individual well ordered is a microcosm of society,
Speaker 1: which itself is a microcosm of the cosmos. And so
Speaker 1: we get this what we might look up as I
Speaker 1: look at as a bottom up model, but which really
Speaker 1: is a top down model with the heavens kind of
Speaker 1: rightly ordering all the way down to the individual, and
Speaker 1: then everything works its way back up. It's the sort
Speaker 1: of exit return motif which is very important for medieval theology,
Speaker 1: that everything comes from God and everything in its right
Speaker 1: order returns back to God. And so we see that
Speaker 1: play out in the way that's society works, which of
Speaker 1: course malcating society. At the top of this ordered society, well,
Speaker 1: now you have the philosopher king of the Oyarsa, and
Speaker 1: so it's very platonic, or it's very Christian platonic, as
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Speaker 1: now back to the show. Oh right, well, is there
Speaker 1: anything else that anyone would like to throw in there
Speaker 1: about out of the Silent Planet before we move on
Speaker 1: to Perlandro.
Speaker 4: Great question for you all. I can't remember. Are we
Speaker 4: told what Folchandro what the Silent Planet was called before
Speaker 4: it became.
Speaker 1: Bookandro, Not that I know of. Nope, I guess well,
Speaker 1: we'll never know. It's u prelapsarian name. Well, keeping that silent,
Speaker 1: I suppose moving on to Peralandra. So in this story,
Speaker 1: now we have we're actually beginning with the character of C. S.
Speaker 1: Lewis as he kind of writes himself into the story.
Speaker 5: And so C. S.
Speaker 1: Lewis is going to see his friend Ransom, and as
Speaker 1: he goes to see Ransom, he feels this great dread,
Speaker 1: this great anxiety, and he's really just being haunted. That's
Speaker 1: the best word. And I think that Lewis even uses
Speaker 1: that word. It feels like a haunted journey, haunted house.
Speaker 1: And I love how Lewis meditates on that word haunted
Speaker 1: when he says that it's a kind of a word
Speaker 1: where even a child who's never heard the definition before,
Speaker 1: you just hear the word haunted and you kind of
Speaker 1: have an idea as to what it means. It's like
Speaker 1: the idea is contained within the sound. But anyways, he's
Speaker 1: very haunted, and eventually he does make his way to
Speaker 1: Ransom's house despite the fact that he's just so terrified,
Speaker 1: and Ransom is at home, but he sees a note
Speaker 1: on the door and so he goes inside and this
Speaker 1: is when he comes in contact with the uyarsa Malcandra,
Speaker 1: who's there waiting for Ransom, and he recognizes that this
Speaker 1: thing is good, that this thing is bigger and really
Speaker 1: more real than he is, and he's initially terrified of that.
Speaker 1: And we get this some great lines about kind of
Speaker 1: our perception of goodness, that we tend to think that
Speaker 1: goodness is going to be good for us, because we
Speaker 1: don't stop to think that maybe we're bent creatures and
Speaker 1: maybe the good is actually going to overpower or maybe
Speaker 1: even destroy us. But nonetheless, eventually Ransom shows up, and
Speaker 1: it becomes revealed that Ransom is being tasked by Malacandra
Speaker 1: to go to Perilandra, which we know as Venus. He
Speaker 1: doesn't really know why he's going there, but he gets
Speaker 1: in this coffin shaped vessel and is shot off to
Speaker 1: Perilandrum where he lands or better yet, he's really received
Speaker 1: into Perilandra, as we get this Venusian influence playing out here,
Speaker 1: and he comes in contact with the Green Lady Tinadrill,
Speaker 1: who is, as Lewis says in one of his letters,
Speaker 1: she's kind of a mix between Eve and Mary. She
Speaker 1: is a pre fallen woman, and this is the only
Speaker 1: person that Lewis comes in contact with for quite a while,
Speaker 1: but eventually we see somebody else fall down like lightning,
Speaker 1: and this of course is going to be Weston, who
Speaker 1: very quickly turns into or is revealed to be the
Speaker 1: unman essentially the devil. And so for most of the
Speaker 1: book we get this conflict, or this contest as Weston
Speaker 1: or as the unmanned, the Devil and Ransom really compete
Speaker 1: for the soul of Tenadrill and Parentlandra really as as
Speaker 1: a whole. And eventually Ransom recognizes that this is not
Speaker 1: going to be a debate, that he can't out rhetoric
Speaker 1: the devil, but what he can apparently do is punch
Speaker 1: him in the face, and so they get into a
Speaker 1: physical fight, and eventually in the in the the belly
Speaker 1: of Perilandra down in the earth, Ransom kills the un
Speaker 1: man comes up and then we get this grand ceremony
Speaker 1: of glorification as Tinadrill and Tor and Peralandra all enter
Speaker 1: into their glory. And so that really is the story.
Speaker 1: There's I mean, there's a lot we could deal with here,
Speaker 1: but let's see what comes out to you. Um, I
Speaker 1: can go at random at this point, Catherine, what do
Speaker 1: you have?
Speaker 7: Okay?
Speaker 2: I was thinking about this over the last few days,
Speaker 2: because it had been a while right since we've done Perilandra,
Speaker 2: and of the of the three, Perilandra honestly is not
Speaker 2: the one that I think of the most. I do
Speaker 2: find it the most difficult, I think, even though that
Speaker 2: ind you, Strength is a little bit harder to get into.
Speaker 2: I find Perilandra hard conceptually to get into. However, with
Speaker 2: that said, as we were thinking of the marshall right,
Speaker 2: the manly influence of and then the Nusian or the
Speaker 2: feminine influence of Perilandra, I was thinking about Lewis the medievalist,
Speaker 2: and the way that Ransom seems to show us the
Speaker 2: ideal of courtly love, because he's there and right, as
Speaker 2: we've alluded to, he is going to rescue the Green Lady.
Speaker 2: He's going to rescue Tenandirl from evil. But he does
Speaker 2: not do it in order to win her hand. He's
Speaker 2: not romantically interested or is going to earn anything for this.
Speaker 2: He simply does it for love of the lady, in
Speaker 2: order to reunite her with her proper mate, with the King.
Speaker 2: I thought that was really beautiful that for both of
Speaker 2: these novels. And then again as we bridge to that
Speaker 2: hideos strength, since they're both interested in gender and looking
Speaker 2: at kind of archetypes of those things. I thought it
Speaker 2: was beautiful that he sets up this second novel and
Speaker 2: he gives us this platonic form of love and relationship
Speaker 2: between the two of them.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's definitely significant that we get the order of
Speaker 1: these books right. That he begins in Malacandrum, and then
Speaker 1: he's even commissioned by Malcandra, by by the real Mars,
Speaker 1: and so he's being commissioned in this martial influence to
Speaker 1: play the knight, to use his strength in service of
Speaker 1: the lady. And so we definitely do get that that courtly,
Speaker 1: that very you know, knightly chivalric relationship between Ransom and
Speaker 1: Tenandral who uses his strength not to dominate but to
Speaker 1: serve to guard her virtue. Well, I guess I'll let
Speaker 1: everyone else talk before I pontificate further. Olivia, what do
Speaker 1: you have for us?
Speaker 4: This might be my favorite of the trilogy because it's
Speaker 4: just so pleasant to be in just the way he
Speaker 4: describes Perlandra, and it really does sound so editic, so heavenly,
Speaker 4: so just like a place you want to be, like
Speaker 4: that hideous strength where the atmosphere is very different. Lewis
Speaker 4: in general is so good at writing, but good like
Speaker 4: other authors, they either just can't comprehend goodness entirely, or
Speaker 4: they they can't put like no flesh and blood to it,
Speaker 4: like it's just a static thing. But Lewis breathes life
Speaker 4: into it. He's like able to incarnate good in a
Speaker 4: way that most authors can't. And we see that in Perlandra,
Speaker 4: where just the whole world is unfallen and good and
Speaker 4: brimming with vitality. And then let Alone, of course your
Speaker 4: tour into na drawl, and as we see in thee
Speaker 4: Rss as well, and then in contrast, he sets up
Speaker 4: that that paradise so well that then when Weston comes,
Speaker 4: there's that scene where Ransom wakes up and he finds
Speaker 4: the dismembered frogs and he sees the one frog that's
Speaker 4: been you mutilated, and then more and more frogs, and
Speaker 4: he finds Western mutilating another frog. And in our world,
Speaker 4: I think we're just so innundated with suffering and with
Speaker 4: horrors that to see them in Perilandra and that you
Speaker 4: unblemished world, we really appreciate the tragedy of just the
Speaker 4: one fallen Sparrow, let alone everything else, but just to
Speaker 4: see that one mutilated frog but filled Ransom with such horror.
Speaker 4: He felt like he was going to be sick, and
Speaker 4: you feel that as the reader. But with that contrast
Speaker 4: between that perfect goodness and the suffering and the horror,
Speaker 4: even in just that one small act. Just as an aside,
Speaker 4: I don't think Lewis ever goes into defail about like
Speaker 4: what shade of green the Green Lady is, but I
Speaker 4: kind of imagine her as looking a little bit like
Speaker 4: Statue of Liberty, which of course is copper, and copper
Speaker 4: is the metal associated with Venus. So that's why head canon.
Speaker 1: Anyway, Well, I like it, and you know, knowing Lewis,
Speaker 1: I don't think it's necessarily beyond the mark. Everything that
Speaker 1: he does is intentional, so yeah, I think it's very possible.
Speaker 1: But yeah, Lewis does do such a great job of
Speaker 1: giving us the spirit of the good, of love, of beauty,
Speaker 1: which of course is the influence of Venus. I think
Speaker 1: that just exudes love and beauty. I mean throughout the text,
Speaker 1: even to the very way that he's received into the
Speaker 1: planet and so back in out of the side of
Speaker 1: the planet, and when he lands on Malacandra, he's landing
Speaker 1: on a very hard, solid surface and disorienting, and you know,
Speaker 1: he gets sick, and in fact, he's even described as
Speaker 1: feeling like a pregnant and so it's his idea that
Speaker 1: as he encounters the hyper masculine, he feels feminine in
Speaker 1: relation to it in a very almost like sickening kind
Speaker 1: of way. So it's all just disorienting and he's thrown off,
Speaker 1: whereas in Peralandra he doesn't really land on the planet.
Speaker 1: He's received into it and then the vessel just sort
Speaker 1: of dissolves around him, and so it's very different experience.
Speaker 1: He doesn't as much land as he has received. And
Speaker 1: then there's so much emphasis on pleasure in the right context,
Speaker 1: to the point where he's initially thrown off because it
Speaker 1: feels like to experience that kind of pleasure should be sinful,
Speaker 1: but it's not, because he's encountering unfallen pleasure, pleasure in
Speaker 1: its right context, where it's not just self referential, but
Speaker 1: it's actually pulling him out of himself even more. And
Speaker 1: then obviously there's something special about the innocence of tor
Speaker 1: or of Tinadrill. Well, I guess tour as well but
Speaker 1: you know, Tim trel is obviously who we're encountering a
Speaker 1: lot more that it really does highlight the fact that
Speaker 1: lu is also really good at demonstrating the demonic as
Speaker 1: well the evil. And I love the depictions that we
Speaker 1: get of the unman which really, as Olivia you mentioned,
Speaker 1: we see seeds of that in Western at the end
Speaker 1: of Out of the Side of the Planet, that this
Speaker 1: is part of the same trajectory where he's into progress
Speaker 1: for the sake of progress, where he has this great pride,
Speaker 1: but there's really no substance there. He is the actual space,
Speaker 1: right not the heavens. He is the space. The emptiness
Speaker 1: one of my favorite parts this is just always, I
Speaker 1: don't know, I find it kind of funny've also insightful,
Speaker 1: where the Unmanned is giving all of these stories to Tenandrill,
Speaker 1: trying to lead her to see herself as some kind
Speaker 1: of heroic, feminine tragedy of swords, and so he's trying
Speaker 1: to call her to step outside of herself, to progress
Speaker 1: into the void, to be this pioneer. And he's going
Speaker 1: through all these stories and when one doesn't really land,
Speaker 1: he just drops it and goes to another one. And
Speaker 1: so it seems kind of random's kind of chaotic, and
Speaker 1: at first Ransom isn't really clear exactly what's going on here,
Speaker 1: how all these stories are connected. But then Lewis says,
Speaker 1: Alassid dawned upon him when all these stories were about.
Speaker 1: Each one of these women had stood forth alone and
Speaker 1: braved a terrible risk for her child, her lover, or
Speaker 1: her people, excuse me. Each one had misunderstood, reviled, and persecuted,
Speaker 1: but each also magnificently vindicated by the event. The precise
Speaker 1: details were often not very easy to follow. Rainsom had
Speaker 1: more than a suspicion that many of these noble pioneers
Speaker 1: had been what an ordinary terrestrial speech we call witches,
Speaker 1: a perverse. So he's getting all these disconnected stories of
Speaker 1: progress and heroism. But he says, I get this impression
Speaker 1: that really what we're dealing with when you stip away
Speaker 1: the rhetoric and get to these substance or lack thereof
Speaker 1: of what's being presented, it's just which is some perverts.
Speaker 1: And if that does not strike home with the way
Speaker 1: that we the way the modern culture you know, puts
Speaker 1: forth ideas through media, through politicians, that pretty much all
Speaker 1: of the heroes that are propped up when you really
Speaker 1: get down to it, I mean, we're dealing with heroes
Speaker 1: that are in avoid, and heroes that are in an
Speaker 1: avoid can't really be heroic. They don't have any substance
Speaker 1: to stand on, They don't have any substance to give you.
Speaker 1: All they can do is suck you into their domain
Speaker 1: at best. And well, that's not heroic, that's not sacrificial,
Speaker 1: that's not beautiful, it's not good. There's no way it
Speaker 1: could be. They don't have a context for that. And
Speaker 1: so I think that Lewis is doing a great job
Speaker 1: here of just demonstrating the emptiness of modern progressive rhetoric.
Speaker 1: All right, Jordan, what do you have from Perilandra?
Speaker 7: All right? So I'd like to carry my dominion theme
Speaker 7: through here. That so, when Weston's craft lands and Ransom
Speaker 7: realizes who it is, he sprints down this mountain like
Speaker 7: a crazy man in order to stop her from meeting him.
Speaker 7: And before that, there's this this whole conversation how he
Speaker 7: needs to go meet meet with this this this new
Speaker 7: person that's come into Perilandra, how she should really stay away,
Speaker 7: and she says that she must go and meet him
Speaker 7: because she is the lady and mother of Perilandra, and
Speaker 7: that it would not do for Ransom to to do that,
Speaker 7: that it really is her duty as as the one
Speaker 7: who has dominion over Perilandra. I really thought that was
Speaker 7: that was kind of interesting. So that's kind of that
Speaker 7: part carrying through. And then also, I guess sort of
Speaker 7: almost a perversion of that, you know, kind of going
Speaker 7: off of what you were talking about, Andrew, was when
Speaker 7: the young man was talking about the stories about men
Speaker 7: and how how they were, you know, sluggish octs, like
Speaker 7: they were prepared to try nothing, risk nothing, make no exertion,
Speaker 7: that they're they're kind of knuckle draggers, I guess you
Speaker 7: could say. And Ransom, who in the book it's said
Speaker 7: that he doesn't really have any pride in his own sex,
Speaker 7: found himself almost believing it for a minute. And the
Speaker 7: interesting thing to me with that was that, you know,
Speaker 7: that's a constant drumbeat that we hear an awful lot
Speaker 7: from media and entertainment today that men are sort of
Speaker 7: stupid and their wives, you know, are essentially having to
Speaker 7: raise another child along with the children that that she
Speaker 7: shares with this man. And so there's sort of an
Speaker 7: inversion there of the of the of the dominion deal there.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I guess in that point we can say it's
Speaker 1: all in Homer Simpson. Yeah. I think that's just a
Speaker 1: good point that Lewis is doing such a great job
Speaker 1: of correcting, basically from every angle, the way that we
Speaker 1: tend to view gender, that it is something real, and
Speaker 1: that there is a glory to feminine, and there is
Speaker 1: a glory to the masculine, and that that's what really
Speaker 1: that's a central theme of this entire series. It's all
Speaker 1: about the right relationship of the masculine to the feminine.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Well, I won't get too abstract at this point. Well,
Speaker 1: we'll leave it there for now and I'll let other
Speaker 1: people talk. Jackie, what do you have from Perilandro?
Speaker 7: Yeah?
Speaker 5: So I thought the opening scene again was really fun.
Speaker 5: I love that Lewis threw himself in there as the narrator,
Speaker 5: and we hear already about how Ransom's reputation has evolved
Speaker 5: over the course of the space between these two books,
Speaker 5: and how he's known to keep strange company, which makes
Speaker 5: me think of Hebrews thirteen and entertaining angels. But then
Speaker 5: we see Ransom to put all that he learned in
Speaker 5: Out of the Silent Planet into play here on pera
Speaker 5: Landra for a great service and intervention, And it's a
Speaker 5: really wonderful story. I do love the point that Jordan
Speaker 5: was making about how the lady of Perlandra would be
Speaker 5: so inhospitable for her to not greet her guests, and
Speaker 5: how she is so fearless and she's so brave. She's
Speaker 5: a wonderful female character in Lewis, and she foreshadows all
Speaker 5: of these great characters we get in that hideous strength
Speaker 5: who are women also? So it all ties in very nicely.
Speaker 1: Good, fantastic. All right, My screens had jump around a
Speaker 1: little bit on me, David.
Speaker 6: But when I was looking through this again today, something
Speaker 6: hit me. In chapter two, when Lewis has been facing
Speaker 6: this kind of spiritual attack on the way there, and
Speaker 6: when he actually meets with Ransom, he says, I'm getting
Speaker 6: more worried every day about this whole business. And it
Speaker 6: came into my head as I was on my way here. Oh,
Speaker 6: they'll put all sorts of things into your head if
Speaker 6: you let them, said Ransom lightly. The best plan is
Speaker 6: to take no notice and keep straight on. Don't try
Speaker 6: to answer them. They like drawing you into an interminable argument,
Speaker 6: and I feel like that foreshadows the interminable argument that
Speaker 6: he gets into on Perilandra, and he kind of forgets
Speaker 6: his own advice when he gets there. And I feel
Speaker 6: like larger themes in this book are that he's painting
Speaker 6: a picture again of a world. What would it be
Speaker 6: like to truly be content? What does true contentment look like?
Speaker 6: And the whole nature of Perilandra in the beginning is
Speaker 6: you have to just take everything as it comes. Here's
Speaker 6: the fruit that has been brought to you. It's totally
Speaker 6: dark at night, you wake up in almost literally a
Speaker 6: whole new world because the island, the flotilla of plants
Speaker 6: that you are riding the waves on, well maybe it
Speaker 6: has brought you next to another one that you can explore,
Speaker 6: or maybe you're nowhere near. They have to trust God
Speaker 6: and take what he brings to them. And when he
Speaker 6: starts talking about you know, well he has that one
Speaker 6: fruit that is just so amazing that he wants another one.
Speaker 6: But then he realizes it was so amazing that it
Speaker 6: would cheapen it like trying to listen to the same
Speaker 6: symphony twice in a day. That he needed to move on.
Speaker 6: And then he discovered that there were some berries he
Speaker 6: was eating, and every once in a while one of
Speaker 6: them would have a red sinner that just tasted amazing.
Speaker 6: And he said, you know, on Earth, we would have
Speaker 6: figured out how to just breed those red ones in
Speaker 6: charge extra money just for that. But I believe he's
Speaker 6: talking to the lady and trying to explain how you
Speaker 6: want things. I can't remember if it was the unmanner,
Speaker 6: if it was ransom, But she says, the picture of
Speaker 6: the fruit you have not found is still for a
Speaker 6: moment before you, And if you wished, if it were
Speaker 6: possible to wish, you could keep it there. You could
Speaker 6: send your soul after the good you'd expected, instead of
Speaker 6: turning it to the good you had got. You could
Speaker 6: refuse the real good. You could make the real fruit
Speaker 6: taste insipid by thinking of the other. And I just
Speaker 6: I don't know. I never really thought about contentment in
Speaker 6: that way and the way that you know. We'll quote
Speaker 6: Galatians and say I can do all things through Christ,
Speaker 6: who gives me strength, and will take that to mean
Speaker 6: I can win the big game, or I can get
Speaker 6: this job. I can be the most successful person in
Speaker 6: the area. But in context, it means I can take
Speaker 6: whatever God puts in my path. I can live whatever
Speaker 6: life God has given me and be content with it.
Speaker 6: Because Paul was talking about I've been in prison, i
Speaker 6: have had things, I've gone hungry, and I can do
Speaker 6: all of these things because I am relying on the
Speaker 6: strength of Christ and so and it kind of comes
Speaker 6: to a head as Ransom knows that, Hey, the reason
Speaker 6: I'm being sent I don't know what it is. But
Speaker 6: he kind of convinces himself that it can't it can't
Speaker 6: be this. You know, I'm just going to say, hey,
Speaker 6: I gave it my best try and I didn't succeed.
Speaker 6: And then he realizes that that that's not that's not right,
Speaker 6: that he can be the instrument. But then we get
Speaker 6: the wonderful thing towards the end where he's saying, be comforted.
Speaker 6: It is no doing of yours. You're not great, though
Speaker 6: you could have prevented a thing so great that deep
Speaker 6: Heaven sees it with amazement. Be comforted, small one. In
Speaker 6: your smallness. He lays no merit on you. Receive him.
Speaker 6: Be glad, have no fear, lest your shoulders be bearing
Speaker 6: this world Look, it is beneath your head and it
Speaker 6: carries you. And I just think that's beautiful, a beautiful
Speaker 6: example of how we are meant to live as Christians.
Speaker 6: You know, we do not do god favors, and the
Speaker 6: Ephesians two ten says, you know, we are His creation,
Speaker 6: created in Christ Jesus, to do good works that He
Speaker 6: has placed in our path so that we will walk
Speaker 6: in them, which is what the lady is doing all
Speaker 6: over Perilander. She's just walking wherever. That's why they have
Speaker 6: the rule at the beginning, at least not to stay
Speaker 6: on the solid ground. You're going to be carried where
Speaker 6: God wants you to be. And I just think it's
Speaker 6: a fascinating way to get these ideas across.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that's very well said. We really see
Speaker 1: a central theme of Lewis playing out in this book
Speaker 1: where we go from I mean, essentially, yeah, we go
Speaker 1: from this materialistic modernist viewpoint. You know, even though as
Speaker 1: we've said, ranisoms of professing Christian. They see s Lewis
Speaker 1: character is a professing Christian, but they's still very much
Speaker 1: coming out of modernity and learning to experience these things
Speaker 1: that modernity, even modern Christianity can't really account for and
Speaker 1: so they're going from this very limited context. And of course,
Speaker 1: for Lewis, I mean Hell is the most limited context
Speaker 1: that you can have in the medieval worldview. I mean
Speaker 1: this is at the center of the earth. Hell is,
Speaker 1: and in Hell for Lewis go to the Great Divorce.
Speaker 1: What you have is radical isolation. You have as small
Speaker 1: of a context as you could possibly get. You know,
Speaker 1: even the homes in Hell are nothing more than the
Speaker 1: projection of the mind. They're not real. So everything is
Speaker 1: confined down to the individual. You get hyper isolation. Whereas
Speaker 1: as you move further up into deep heaven, you let
Speaker 1: go of yourself. You learn not to consume, not to take,
Speaker 1: but you learn to just receive, and in receiving, your
Speaker 1: context broadens out, even as far as the context of God,
Speaker 1: to the proportion that we're able to receive and be
Speaker 1: glad receive the way that is sent to you receive
Speaker 1: the pleasure as it comes, recognizing that it is not
Speaker 1: your own. We see I think a lot of Boetheus
Speaker 1: playing out here when we look at our relationship to fortune.
Speaker 1: You know, Boethius really makes his point. Boethius himself being
Speaker 1: somebody who's lived his life as far as at least
Speaker 1: any external perspective goes according to virtue, according to reason.
Speaker 1: He seemed to be a pretty good guy. But now
Speaker 1: he finds himself in prison, with everything taken away and
Speaker 1: awaiting his execution, as it will come to turn out.
Speaker 1: And so he's meditating on his relationship to fortune. You know,
Speaker 1: if I did everything right, why was everything taken away
Speaker 1: from me? And what he comes to recognize is that
Speaker 1: fortune is what it is, Lady. Fortune is blind for
Speaker 1: a reason, and so from our perspective, we can't count
Speaker 1: on anything in this moving world except for the stability
Speaker 1: that stands at the back. And so what we can't
Speaker 1: do is to rely on moving fortune. What we can do, however,
Speaker 1: is anchor ourselves in the only stable thing. And as
Speaker 1: Lewis says in The Great Divorce, heaven is what stands
Speaker 1: when everything else is shaken, and so that is the
Speaker 1: place where we can anchor ourselves. And when we anchor
Speaker 1: ourselves there, then we're ready to receive whatever fortune comes
Speaker 1: our way. And as Bowethia says, for the good man,
Speaker 1: all fortune actually ends up being good fortune. You know,
Speaker 1: maybe you know, maybe you win the lottery and money
Speaker 1: falls into your hand. As long as you hold out
Speaker 1: an open hand, well that's a good thing. Well maybe
Speaker 1: someone robs your house and you lose everything that you have,
Speaker 1: Well that's just going to further stabilize you in the
Speaker 1: good if you are in fact a good man, and
Speaker 1: say what we tend to see as good fortune bad fortune.
Speaker 1: You know, you spin the wheel, you hit the million
Speaker 1: dollar mark, or you go bankrupt. Either way, it's good
Speaker 1: fortune for the good man. And I think that we
Speaker 1: see a lot of that theme play out in Perilandra,
Speaker 1: or even see some of that in Out of the
Speaker 1: Side of the Planet. In his discussion with the the
Speaker 1: the herosa about pleasure about how it's not something that
Speaker 1: you hold onto, it's something that spreads out over eternity
Speaker 1: when we are receiving it in the right way. And
Speaker 1: so yeah, I think that we see a lot of
Speaker 1: very important themes for Louis playing out there. And I
Speaker 1: think that David, you probat lad that out more succinctly
Speaker 1: and clearly than I did. And so I'm probably just
Speaker 1: jabbering on like the young man right now, but yeah,
Speaker 1: so very well said, uh, Chase, what do you have
Speaker 1: for Perilandra?
Speaker 3: So I love this book. I got a big quote here.
Speaker 3: I really just enjoy ransom struggle with I guess it's
Speaker 3: the vallible self, like his inner monologue, the fighting kind
Speaker 3: of light confusion at why he should be there, why
Speaker 3: does it have to be him? But the quote is
Speaker 3: his mind darted hopefully down a side alley that seemed
Speaker 3: to promise escape. Very well. Then he had been brought miraculously.
Speaker 3: He was in God's hands as long as he did
Speaker 3: his best, and he had done his best, God would
Speaker 3: see to the final issue. He had not succeeded, but
Speaker 3: he had done his best. No one could do more.
Speaker 3: He must not be worried about the final result. Leildo
Speaker 3: would see to that, and Meleelde would bring him back
Speaker 3: to Earth efforts, very real, unsuccessful efforts. Probably Meleldale's real
Speaker 3: intention was that he should publish to the human race
Speaker 3: the truth he had learned on the planet Penis. As
Speaker 3: for the fate of Venus, that could not really rest
Speaker 3: upon his shoulders. It was in God's hands. One must
Speaker 3: be content to leave it there. One must have faith.
Speaker 3: It snapped like a violentistrey, and then it goes on
Speaker 3: a little bit later. It says it was true that
Speaker 3: if he left it undone Alotle to himself will do
Speaker 3: some greater thing instead. In that sense, he stood for Malal,
Speaker 3: but no more than Eve would have stood for him
Speaker 3: by simply not the capital. And I think it just
Speaker 3: speaks so much of like how we should be in
Speaker 3: our own life in relation to God. We you know,
Speaker 3: we're all faced with adversity or tough situations, and we
Speaker 3: question why we're put put where we're put, but we
Speaker 3: need to be able to like recognize that God put
Speaker 3: that opportunity for action in front of us. I think
Speaker 3: this goes especially with like sharing the gospel I've had
Speaker 3: trouble for where you know you're thinking, man, why isn't
Speaker 3: somebody that like actually can fully explain everything that needs
Speaker 3: to be explained to this person when I know little
Speaker 3: to nothing. But they're put in your path, and it's
Speaker 3: wrong to think that you're not prepared because they could.
Speaker 3: You're not the one doing it, you know, ultimately, And
Speaker 3: this goes even further with you know, some situations are
Speaker 3: not going to take just works. Like Ransom is not
Speaker 3: a that violent guy. He doesn't want to fight the
Speaker 3: young man. He wants to like just be able to
Speaker 3: persuade her that that what the unman is saying is wrong.
Speaker 3: It's evil, but it's not working, and it's finally going
Speaker 3: to just take physical action and it does sometimes cause
Speaker 3: that and that's something that hopefully we don't have to
Speaker 3: face our lifetime, but who knows, and we just have
Speaker 3: to be ready to fight evil to protect good.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I think that's a good point. That one things
Speaker 1: that we get from Perlandro is that words at best
Speaker 1: are have to be expressions of concrete realities. By words alone,
Speaker 1: I mean, they are instruments. And so I don't want
Speaker 1: to downplay words and you know, use that really bad
Speaker 1: adage that you know, you know, preach the gospel and
Speaker 1: use words if necessary. Now that that's you need words,
Speaker 1: and so that's not the point. But words themselves can't
Speaker 1: stand on their own. They have to be expressions of
Speaker 1: concrete realities. And I think that's what Lewis is giving
Speaker 1: us through myth hear. I mean, I do agree that
Speaker 1: even in the primary world, yeah, of course there is
Speaker 1: a place for violence, but I don't think that's really what
Speaker 1: Lewis is telling us. I think that what Lewis is
Speaker 1: telling us is that concrete realities need to be met
Speaker 1: with concrete realities. And in fact, back before they go
Speaker 1: off to Venus, when Lewis is talking to Ransom and
Speaker 1: he's a little thrown off by this whole ordeal, as
Speaker 1: you would expect that he would be. Ransom quote scripture,
Speaker 1: and you know, he talks about how we need to
Speaker 1: you know, cast down powers in heavenly places, and he says, well,
Speaker 1: maybe that's a little bit more literal than we once thought.
Speaker 1: And so that's really what this story is. It's about
Speaker 1: fighting the demonic with concrete realities. And there's really only
Speaker 1: one time where Ransom really wins a debate with the
Speaker 1: young man, and that's when Ransom is specifically falling into
Speaker 1: or talking about the incarnation, which is obviously the most
Speaker 1: concrete thing that we can talk about, and so that's
Speaker 1: really the only point where he wins. And specifically, the
Speaker 1: young man is talking about introducing death and Ransom says, well,
Speaker 1: what about when meleel Dell experienced death? You know, how
Speaker 1: did that go for you? Essentially, And that's really the
Speaker 1: one point that Ransom gets on him. But other than that, yeah,
Speaker 1: the young man just constantly out rhetorics him. And that's
Speaker 1: because in the domain of abstractions. Dealing with abstractions, well,
Speaker 1: the devil is probably gonna win at that. That's the
Speaker 1: realm of sophistry. And it makes me think of screw Tape, which,
Speaker 1: as we talked about in the class, at least at
Speaker 1: one point Lewis's mind was part of the Ransom canon.
Speaker 1: But I think it's the first letter of the Screwtape letters.
Speaker 1: When Screwtape says to I always want to say warm
Speaker 1: tongue Wormwood. He says to Wormwood, don't try to convince
Speaker 1: your patient that materialism is true. Just convince them that
Speaker 1: it's stunning and brave, all right, convince them that it's
Speaker 1: courageous and it's progressive and it's forward thinking. And so
Speaker 1: when we're just dealing in the realm of rhetoric, well,
Speaker 1: the devil has the upper hand there because we're dealing
Speaker 1: with abstractions. And that's just like it's it's winds. It's
Speaker 1: easy to redirect. But it's concrete reality that is ultimately
Speaker 1: going to win over the void. It's the word that
Speaker 1: is going to bring form out of darkness, out of chaos.
Speaker 1: And so you need substance to defeat empty vacuity, the
Speaker 1: space which just as we get this inversion between you know,
Speaker 1: what's at the center of the cosmos? Is it what
Speaker 1: we call space? Is is it the Earth?
Speaker 4: No?
Speaker 1: I mean the real space is well, it's it's in
Speaker 1: our hearts, it's it's in our minds. That's the space
Speaker 1: that you know, western and divine even brought into the heavens.
Speaker 1: That's the space that we now see on Perilandra, whereas
Speaker 1: the heavens fill us with substance. Now there is at
Speaker 1: least one more thing that I want to quote from Perilandra,
Speaker 1: and then if anyone else will saying, think you can,
Speaker 1: and then we'll move on. But one thing that we
Speaker 1: see here is that Lewis is giving us something of
Speaker 1: his own philosophy of earth like theology started to draw
Speaker 1: the line sometimes of mythology. You know, obviously Lewis placed
Speaker 1: he saw a lot of value in pagan mythology that
Speaker 1: at least in where it did things correctly. It's expressing
Speaker 1: real human desires, even real human knowledge of the divine.
Speaker 1: And there's this great line where after Ransom has encountered
Speaker 1: the true Mars and the true Venus, he said, or
Speaker 1: Lewis says, our mythology is based on a solider reality
Speaker 1: than we dream, but is also at an almost infinite
Speaker 1: distance from that base. And when they told him this,
Speaker 1: Rainsomott last understood why mythology was what it was, gleams
Speaker 1: of celestial strength and beauty falling on a jungle of
Speaker 1: filth and imbecility. I think that right there is such
Speaker 1: a great line, and at least in my reckoning, it's
Speaker 1: a good way to understand pagan mythology, that there is
Speaker 1: a lot of good there, as you should expect, simply
Speaker 1: because we're dealing with people made in God's image who
Speaker 1: inescapably have knowledge of that reality, right, that's Romans one,
Speaker 1: And so we see truth coming out here, but it's
Speaker 1: caught up in a jungle of filth and imbecility. And
Speaker 1: so what we're able to do here is to see
Speaker 1: that real light, clear the jungle and bring it back
Speaker 1: into its proper source. And in so doing, I think
Speaker 1: that we can see something of real value. That's what
Speaker 1: the Medievals essentially did with a lot of Roman mythology.
Speaker 1: I mean the fact that even to this day we
Speaker 1: still refer to the planets by Roman names. And there's
Speaker 1: the reason why that carried through time that's because I
Speaker 1: think that, you know, looking at classical mythology, we can
Speaker 1: see things that are real and things that are true
Speaker 1: that simply need to be brought into the right context.
Speaker 1: And so I just I like, what LUs A doing there?
Speaker 1: All right, Jordan, what did you want to say there?
Speaker 7: So one other thing that that kind of came up was,
Speaker 7: and you kind of touched on this a little bit,
Speaker 7: was kind of how the incarnation is the is the
Speaker 7: fundamental change in the universe. There's one comment in the
Speaker 7: story about how Earth becomes the corner at which all
Speaker 7: things change, and that's why the green Lady, aside from
Speaker 7: her her shade, looks like a human being. That the
Speaker 7: incarnation made a definite change to the whole universe, and
Speaker 7: that that sort of builds on some that happens early
Speaker 7: on in the story that when Weston first arrives, before
Speaker 7: he invites tash Or the evil spirit, to take over
Speaker 7: his body, Weston talks about his interest now in spreading spirituality,
Speaker 7: which is a little bit of a change or maybe
Speaker 7: just a development of what had happened in Out of
Speaker 7: the Silent Planet, and then he goes on to talk
Speaker 7: about how God is a spirit and that's why we
Speaker 7: believe in him, and how he's also as that spirit
Speaker 7: the guiding purpose of man. And he has this quote
Speaker 7: that I think is really kind of interesting. He says,
Speaker 7: pure spirit the final vortex of self thinking, self originating activity.
Speaker 7: So it's this, it's this sort of self absorbed thing,
Speaker 7: admittedly a self absorbed thing. But the counter to that,
Speaker 7: of course, is that God is not just a spirit,
Speaker 7: that he has taken on human flesh, that he has
Speaker 7: become a man. And this is the scandal of the
Speaker 7: particularity of the incarnation. That Christians don't just worship God
Speaker 7: because he's a spirit. We worship God because he has
Speaker 7: become man to redeem men. Weston's whole argument is sort
Speaker 7: of a kind of Manicheanism or a sort of gnosticism
Speaker 7: that just kind of floats in this ethereal spiritual realm
Speaker 7: that doesn't really want to stick to anything in particular
Speaker 7: because it wants to make whatever claim it wants to make.
Speaker 7: But God has actually taken on human flesh and that
Speaker 7: fundamentally changes absolutely everything, not just in the story but
Speaker 7: also in our realm as well.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's definitely a very important point, and I do
Speaker 1: think that's a great conversation before Weston goes full on
Speaker 1: unman in that initial conversation, which is really more of
Speaker 1: a monologue than the conversation that he has with Ransom,
Speaker 1: and he keeps telling Ransom, you know, I believe in
Speaker 1: essentially the same thing as you. I believe in the
Speaker 1: Holy Spirit, even if you want to call it that.
Speaker 1: And so he keeps trying to convince Ransom that they're
Speaker 1: more or less saying the same thing, and Ransom has it,
Speaker 1: keeps saying I don't think so. And this is very
Speaker 1: often what happens when you see sometimes very profound shifts
Speaker 1: in theology, but it gets couched in orthodox language. And
Speaker 1: so I think that Lewis is doing a lot of
Speaker 1: things very simultaneously here in exposing the modern Spirit. If
Speaker 1: you're enjoying this conversation and you would like to go
Speaker 1: further up and further in with the fiction and philosophy
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Speaker 1: back to the show. All right, and Olivia, you said
Speaker 1: you wanted to say something else about Peralandra.
Speaker 4: Yes, I actually I had two things stored reminded me
Speaker 4: of something else. The first I was just going to
Speaker 4: point out that that and I had stepped out for
Speaker 4: a minute there, so maybe someone else said this. I
Speaker 4: apologize if this is redundant. But in that scene where
Speaker 4: the Western's Space Show comes to Periland Drip, it says
Speaker 4: something like a shooting star seemed to have streaked across
Speaker 4: the sky far away on their left, and some seconds
Speaker 4: later an indeterminate noise reached their ears. Then the Green
Speaker 4: Lady says, something has fallen out of deep heaven, and
Speaker 4: that is, you know, another biblical Easter egg, of course,
Speaker 4: to where Jesus says, I think it's a luke ten
Speaker 4: that you know. I was watching a satan fall from
Speaker 4: heaven like lightning, which is itself a reference to I
Speaker 4: forget if it's in the palms or the prophets, I forget.
Speaker 4: And just now reading that again, I noticed that it
Speaker 4: was on the left that he fell, which of course
Speaker 4: is biblically significant. Jordan reminded me of one other thing too,
Speaker 4: and it split my mind. No, I think about it again. So,
Speaker 4: like the Green Lady, I talked about how the world is,
Speaker 4: the whole cosmos is fundamentally changed since the inclination, and
Speaker 4: it just shook me earlier today as I was kind
Speaker 4: of refreshing myself and out of the silent planet. In
Speaker 4: that world we have different now, different moral beings that
Speaker 4: aren't human. Why they do not seem to have been
Speaker 4: tempted in the same way as the Green Lady or
Speaker 4: Adam and Eve maybe that's just not in the story
Speaker 4: that we're given, but I just found that interesting.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, I think that part of the reason
Speaker 1: why we don't see the same kind of temptation is that, yes,
Speaker 1: they are now, but I mean also not humans per se,
Speaker 1: and so I think that we should expect some more
Speaker 1: obvious connection between our redemptive history or I guess our
Speaker 1: fall and their potential fall, and that you know, they're
Speaker 1: following the incarnation as stored inside, and so they are
Speaker 1: I guess more human, But also I don't know, I mean,
Speaker 1: maybe Malcandra had already gone through its probationary phase and
Speaker 1: so we're just not given the same kind of patient there. Right,
Speaker 1: maybe they've already entered into the glory of befitting of
Speaker 1: them being a lower world than the newer Venus on
Speaker 1: the side of the incarnation. Yeah, and so one.
Speaker 4: Has really destroyed the Harndro as it, so he'd already
Speaker 4: had an influence and maybe something happened and we just
Speaker 4: aren't pretty.
Speaker 1: Too Yeah, fair enough, no, no, fair enough? And yeah,
Speaker 1: and so we do get those pretty clear biblical references
Speaker 1: in Peralandrum and also, as we mentioned in Now the
Speaker 1: Side of the Planet and I didn't mention in that
Speaker 1: book or in our discussion of that book that I
Speaker 1: just find it so strange. I don't know if this
Speaker 1: is some commentarial and time that was written, but that
Speaker 1: Lewis says that of the first I don't remember, it's
Speaker 1: like sixty or something reviewers, so only two or three
Speaker 1: caught that he was giving us a Christian story, which
Speaker 1: just strikes me as odd. And so as much as
Speaker 1: we tend to think that people today are biblically illiterate,
Speaker 1: I guess it's not a super recent movement. And I
Speaker 1: just find that interesting that Lewis seems to be pretty
Speaker 1: explicit about this. But all right, so let's go ahead
Speaker 1: and move into that Hideous strength. Let me throw it
Speaker 1: out there. Anyone want to give a summary.
Speaker 6: Got Catherine had something else to say about parlandra oh?
Speaker 1: Did you?
Speaker 4: Uh?
Speaker 2: I can try and use that as a segue to
Speaker 2: summarize to that hideous strength, because that's I think that
Speaker 2: is honestly where I was going. Okay, So if we
Speaker 2: follow the theme of the planets representing the genders and
Speaker 2: the archetypes there, if Maleachandra is dying, right, we get
Speaker 2: this story of a dying planet, and I was thinking
Speaker 2: of the way that man's destiny is death, right, that's
Speaker 2: all of the Hanal on the planet are aware of this.
Speaker 2: They seem to have accepted that they are just the
Speaker 2: last ones. They've seen others die, and they will ultimately
Speaker 2: die as well, and that's the state of man that
Speaker 2: we have to grapple with and accept for all. And
Speaker 2: that also seems to tie in with the medieval theme,
Speaker 2: with that portly imagery, right a night must willingly face death,
Speaker 2: So it's playing on the two levels right of man,
Speaker 2: everyone in man in particular, and then with Venus then
Speaker 2: of course that novel is about rebirth, is about the
Speaker 2: promise of a new life. So we know that we
Speaker 2: face death, but because of the incarnation, as we've now
Speaker 2: just talked about, we have the promise of eternal life
Speaker 2: and there will be something beyond that. So there's promise
Speaker 2: there for the purposes of our class. I loved that
Speaker 2: we stopped and we read screwtape letters in between Parlandra
Speaker 2: and that Hideous Strength, because it seemed like such a
Speaker 2: great connection to show us the way that Earth is
Speaker 2: tempted by or is covered by the bent oarsa. So
Speaker 2: when we're trying to consider what our existence is like
Speaker 2: as human beings. We have to remember that we will die,
Speaker 2: but there is the promise of new life. So if
Speaker 2: I can quickly some of that hideous strength, I think
Speaker 2: this novel is a fantastic pairing to the other two.
Speaker 2: But it is so strange because it doesn't start with
Speaker 2: a journey out into space. So that hideous strength covers
Speaker 2: a marriage. It covers a couple named Mark and Jane,
Speaker 2: and it follows them on two different paths. Where Mark
Speaker 2: is a fairly ambitious academic. He has ideas for a
Speaker 2: great career. He's going to make something of himself. He
Speaker 2: gets tumped it into a demonic situation at a house
Speaker 2: called Belbury, whereas his wife Jane is brought into a
Speaker 2: more angelic or a beatific vision of life at a
Speaker 2: house called St.
Speaker 7: Anne's.
Speaker 2: And while the novel seems to be very dull at first,
Speaker 2: I think that Lewis very deliberately wants us to see
Speaker 2: the dullness of life in this bent world, that if
Speaker 2: you are only focused on ambition or career, you are
Speaker 2: not going to be terribly happy, and you are going
Speaker 2: to have an unhappy marriage. The way that Mark and
Speaker 2: Jane do. And so then over the course of the novel,
Speaker 2: throughout a myriad of mystical events, we start to see
Speaker 2: the way that Mark was deceived. He is able to
Speaker 2: come out of that and come back towards the beatific Vision,
Speaker 2: and Jane is able to really fully embrace her own
Speaker 2: self and her calling and join the beatific vision. Together
Speaker 2: we are able to I don't know if we are
Speaker 2: freeing the world from the spell of the Bent or Yarsa,
Speaker 2: but we are doing a little bit for our own
Speaker 2: little center of the world, for our own little place
Speaker 2: in low grace the medieval term for Arthur's court. And
Speaker 2: maybe that's all that we can do, is try to
Speaker 2: be a little piece of Christendom wherever.
Speaker 4: We are.
Speaker 1: Good. Well done. That Hideous Strength is not an easy
Speaker 1: book to summarize. So well done, and that's anyone who's
Speaker 1: read these books knows that That Hideous Strength is a very
Speaker 1: different book than the first two. And it can be
Speaker 1: a little jarring at first, because one thing, you don't
Speaker 1: start with Ransom, and that can be a little bit
Speaker 1: off putting. This is somebody that you traveled with for
Speaker 1: the first couple of books, and then he's just not
Speaker 1: there until about halfway through. It's a lot more meandering,
Speaker 1: a lot more sprawling. You know, in the other books,
Speaker 1: you're really following one person and his various engagements in
Speaker 1: his journey, whereas now it's just sort of all over
Speaker 1: the place, even though centering around Market and Jane. But
Speaker 1: that's also exactly what we should expect for his story
Speaker 1: in the Silent Planet. This is a story that is disordered.
Speaker 2: At first.
Speaker 1: Things are falling apart. Things are already falling apart where
Speaker 1: we start. We start off with Mark and Jane's dysfunctional
Speaker 1: cold marriage as they're increasingly moving further and further away
Speaker 1: from each other. And so really what we get here
Speaker 1: is analogous to the disorder of Mars and Venus a
Speaker 1: Paralandra in Malacandrum. And so I've even seen some people
Speaker 1: say that you can read this book on his own,
Speaker 1: separate from the series, and I guess you can, but
Speaker 1: you're not going to understand what Lewis is actually doing
Speaker 1: here on the most significant level. It'll come across as
Speaker 1: just some kind of like supernatural crime thriller or something
Speaker 1: which is not what it is. And so it's very
Speaker 1: much tied to Malacantra, it's tied to Parlandrum, and so
Speaker 1: what we get here is disorder that continues to get
Speaker 1: increasingly disordered until the end, where now we're brought back
Speaker 1: into order, where Mars and Venus become properly related, where
Speaker 1: Mark and Jane reunite in this Paralandrian influence. And so,
Speaker 1: you know, a let's just say that the sprawling, kind
Speaker 1: of different nature of this book is exactly what should
Speaker 1: expect for a book on Earth, given the mythos that
Speaker 1: Lewis is giving us. All Right, so let's go around
Speaker 1: the room here and tell me just something that stands
Speaker 1: out to you from this book.
Speaker 7: Jordan, I'm going to carry the dominion theme through to
Speaker 7: this one too, that there seems to be a struggle
Speaker 7: for who's really in control. Is it the powers of
Speaker 7: darkness or is it the powers that are surrounded with
Speaker 7: with with what is good, true and beautiful. One of
Speaker 7: the things that kind of encapsulates that that struggle for
Speaker 7: me is in in in Mark sort of descending into
Speaker 7: that evil. There's this conversation that he has with very
Speaker 7: Hardcastle where she says that they really need to get
Speaker 7: on with their work, they need to have a drink.
Speaker 7: There's it seems like there's a lot more drinking that
Speaker 7: the sort of anesthetizes his descent. He doesn't really maybe
Speaker 7: necessarily notice what's going on. And then I'm going to
Speaker 7: read a little bit of a long quote here, so
Speaker 7: bear with me. This was the first thing Mark had
Speaker 7: been asked to do, which he himself, before he did
Speaker 7: it clearly knew to be criminal. But the moment of
Speaker 7: his consent almost escaped his notice. Certainly there was no struggle,
Speaker 7: no sense of turning a corner. There may have been
Speaker 7: a time in the world's history when such moments fully
Speaker 7: revealed their gravity, with witches prophesying on a blasted heath,
Speaker 7: or visible rubicons to be crossed. But for him it
Speaker 7: all slipped past in a chatter of laughter, of that
Speaker 7: intimate laughter between fellow professionals, which of all earthly powers
Speaker 7: is strongest to make men do very bad things before
Speaker 7: they are yet individually very bad men. A few moments later,
Speaker 7: he was trotting upstairs with the fairy that the the
Speaker 7: descent into evil really is a broad path, that the
Speaker 7: way to destruction is broad, and it's a gentle path
Speaker 7: without sign posts. You just don't see it coming before.
Speaker 7: It's just too late. And I think that's ultimately the
Speaker 7: warning that Lewis is giving across this series. I think
Speaker 7: this is the point that he's been aiming at all along,
Speaker 7: by sort of equipping Ransom for this battle and then
Speaker 7: sort of equipping us then for our struggle with the
Speaker 7: powers of darkness in our own world too.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And to go off that dominion theme, we see
Speaker 1: that Mark Stutick is looking for He's pursuing dominion in
Speaker 1: all the wrong ways in that you know, he's pursuing significance,
Speaker 1: He's pursuing control. He wants to be in the seat
Speaker 1: of power. He wants to be in the inner ring.
Speaker 1: But of course, as he increasingly pursues this inner ring
Speaker 1: goes further and further. You know, he starts off with
Speaker 1: the progressive element at Edgeto at his university, and then
Speaker 1: that feeds into the nice and eventually he finds his
Speaker 1: way literally to the head. But then of course, at
Speaker 1: the top tier of the nice we get people like
Speaker 1: Whither and Frost giving us images of Dante's version of Hell,
Speaker 1: which is frozen over. And so he thinks that he's moving,
Speaker 1: you know, further up and further in he thinks he's
Speaker 1: moving to the seat of power where things are really happening.
Speaker 1: He wants to be in that seat of that hideous strength,
Speaker 1: as Ransom calls it, hence the title of the book.
Speaker 1: But he finds out that he's not actually moving up
Speaker 1: at all. He's moving further and further down. To one sense,
Speaker 1: is the center right in the center of Earth as
Speaker 1: hell in the medieval cosmos, and that is the inner
Speaker 1: ring that he actually ends up discovering. And you know,
Speaker 1: like you said, there's a lot of drinking involved, a
Speaker 1: lot of full delusion involved, and there's this this constant
Speaker 1: pressure on him to bring Jane into the mix, because
Speaker 1: I mean, she can, she has this vision and whatnot,
Speaker 1: and I don't know if we need to get into
Speaker 1: that for this conversation or not. If someone wants to,
Speaker 1: we can, but they want Jane there, and he's resistant
Speaker 1: to that, not even so much for the most part,
Speaker 1: out of a desire to protect her, although some of
Speaker 1: that is there in greater or lesser degrees, but for
Speaker 1: the most part, he's afraid to bring her there because
Speaker 1: that's going to her presence, is going to demonstrate the
Speaker 1: fact that this is all a delusion, a wilful delusion.
Speaker 1: It's not real. He knows he can't explain what's happening
Speaker 1: to her because there's no explanation for it, and so
Speaker 1: he's very much engaging in a wilful delusion in order
Speaker 1: to be there. All right, David, what do you have
Speaker 1: for us?
Speaker 6: I really I love the almost yin and yang parallel
Speaker 6: between Mark's story and Jane's story, because you know, Mark
Speaker 6: is he's being lured down into the darkness by people
Speaker 6: who are using his desire to belong and have value
Speaker 6: to manipulate him into doing evil things. And Jane, on
Speaker 6: the other hand, is kind of being pulled up against
Speaker 6: her will, her will into a genuine community of people
Speaker 6: who love each other in spite of her desire to
Speaker 6: be seen as this independent, modern woman who doesn't fit
Speaker 6: all the traditional roles that she feels like are being
Speaker 6: forced upon her, and she's constantly frustrated when her femininity
Speaker 6: reveals itself in spite of her attempts to suppress it.
Speaker 6: I think so, I don't know, when I first read
Speaker 6: this book years ago, all that was completely lost on me.
Speaker 6: And I feel like, because we've all been talking about
Speaker 6: these aspects of the story, and not the kind of crazy,
Speaker 6: absurd fantasy and sci fi event that all of this
Speaker 6: takes place inside of. In the story, it's really just
Speaker 6: kind of the framework for this relationship between this man
Speaker 6: and woman who they don't understand who they are as
Speaker 6: husband and wife in the beginning, and as they are
Speaker 6: separated from each other, they begin to understand who the
Speaker 6: other one is and who they really are, so that
Speaker 6: all of that can work out. And I find that fascinating. So, yeah,
Speaker 6: I haven't talked about a bear. Nobody's talked about the bear.
Speaker 6: Nobody's talked about Merlin really and all that part of
Speaker 6: the story is great, but I feel like the relationship
Speaker 6: aspects of it are really the heart of what's in
Speaker 6: the story.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and that's one reason why I don't even really
Speaker 1: class the series as sci fi. It has some trappings
Speaker 1: of sci fi, that's not really what it is. It's
Speaker 1: more of I think i'd rather categor the whole series
Speaker 1: is something like a cosmic romance, you know, in the
Speaker 1: classical sense of romance. I don't mean like the cheap
Speaker 1: books in the front of the bookstore. And yeah, actually
Speaker 1: I don't only think I really need anything to that
Speaker 1: well said, all right, Catherine, what do you have?
Speaker 2: Let's see, I would totally echo everything that David just
Speaker 2: said there. I think one of the things that really
Speaker 2: grips you about that hideous drenth is that it is
Speaker 2: it's Lewis working out this relationship between genders as he
Speaker 2: has been in order to make that bigger point that
Speaker 2: all of humanity is, in relation to God, is ultimately
Speaker 2: sort of feminine.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 2: He says that there is that Ransom says that there
Speaker 2: is that which is masculine, which is so much greater
Speaker 2: than all of us, that in relationship to it, we
Speaker 2: are all feminine. So it seems like he is working
Speaker 2: out this idea, this philosophical or theological idea that if
Speaker 2: I'm to figure out how to relate to the masculine,
Speaker 2: I have to know the feminine, right we sort of
Speaker 2: we have to know both. And the scene that always
Speaker 2: sticks in my mind here, the thing that I think
Speaker 2: is the most vivid, is right after Jane had that
Speaker 2: first interview with Ransom, and she's left Saint Anne, She's
Speaker 2: going back to the village. She doesn't know what is
Speaker 2: waiting her for her at the end of it, but
Speaker 2: she's had that conversation with him, and it is so
Speaker 2: transformative that she doesn't notice how much she has changed,
Speaker 2: but other people do. And there's that line about how
Speaker 2: her beauty now comes through in the much stronger and
Speaker 2: more pure way, and she's able to be beautiful for
Speaker 2: the sake of pleasing others or being pleasing to the
Speaker 2: world around her. Right, she doesn't see it, and she's
Speaker 2: now in a place where she doesn't have to feel
Speaker 2: vain about it, she doesn't feel sub conscious about it,
Speaker 2: and she sort of sees the way that her beauty
Speaker 2: is then properly ordered and it is there to give
Speaker 2: joy and happiness to others. And yeah, if that's one
Speaker 2: thing that you can take out of reading this story,
Speaker 2: that's a pretty major thing.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that whole scene and the one preceding it is
Speaker 1: certainly profound. When she comes in contact with Ransom for
Speaker 1: the first time, and she is just overwhelmed by his presence.
Speaker 1: Just by being in his presence, she overwhelmed with images
Speaker 1: of kingship and priesthood and warrior kind of all these
Speaker 1: different really masculine influences, and she's just overwhelmed. And you know,
Speaker 1: for a time she can't even speak, and you know
Speaker 1: eventually she does, and then toward the end of that conversation,
Speaker 1: she starts to feel this overwhelming sense of largeness and
Speaker 1: she starts to just become undone, and she kind of
Speaker 1: glances at Ransom, like, you know, throw me a lifeline here,
Speaker 1: save me. I'm about to be undone, and he pretty
Speaker 1: much says, yeah, i'd be best for you to leave
Speaker 1: right now. And so then she leaves and gets on
Speaker 1: this train and has the reflections that you mentioned, and
Speaker 1: that train ride reflection on what she's experienced very much
Speaker 1: echoes Ransom's experience when he first enters the heavens, which
Speaker 1: I read earlier from out of the Silent Planet, where
Speaker 1: he is just receiving these penetrating, cosmic, heavenly rays of
Speaker 1: light and they are just filling him with a sense
Speaker 1: of substance. He's starting to learn what he is for
Speaker 1: kind of where everything is directed. And Jane now has
Speaker 1: a very very similar experience. I think that Lewis is
Speaker 1: intentionally paralleling these experiences because now she has experienced the
Speaker 1: light of the heavens through Ransom, this priest king who
Speaker 1: is meditating or not meditating, he's mediating the glory, the
Speaker 1: substance of the heavens through his person. She is now
Speaker 1: receiving that through contact with him, and so now she
Speaker 1: has a very similar experience just by the fact that
Speaker 1: she is on Earth. And that speaks, I think, to
Speaker 1: Ransom's role here in serving as a bridge playing a
Speaker 1: part in the redemption of Earth, at least the part
Speaker 1: that he has to play in that. And so yeah,
Speaker 1: I think that train sequence is just this great scene
Speaker 1: where she's starting to experience beauty, her own beauty as
Speaker 1: well as the beauty that is beyond her, which is
Speaker 1: what contextualizes her beauty. And so she just wants to
Speaker 1: go listen to music and read good books and she
Speaker 1: just swept up in the beauty of beauty as she
Speaker 1: becomes better aligned with the Parallandrian ideal that she is
Speaker 1: going to be aligned with. Olivia, what do you have
Speaker 1: for us?
Speaker 4: This is the book that I feel like least prepared
Speaker 4: to discuss, just because there's so much going on. It's
Speaker 4: starting to know where to begin. Like others I mentioned,
Speaker 4: it's a really interesting portrayal of the banality of evil,
Speaker 4: just how you kind of lip and down that sloping road.
Speaker 4: And there's a parallel quote to that in the Securer
Speaker 4: Tay that I can't remember at the moment, but there's
Speaker 4: a lot of parallels there. I find it interesting that
Speaker 4: the book really follows kind of the same trajectory as Weston,
Speaker 4: where Weston he starts off as this materialist, but then
Speaker 4: in Perlandra has that character development where he becomes you know,
Speaker 4: he's into this like depraved form of spirituality, which echoes
Speaker 4: you know, a lot in this book because you know,
Speaker 4: at first the characters that we see and like the
Speaker 4: initial entering are very materialist, but then as we get
Speaker 4: into like the actual entering, and then we start to
Speaker 4: see you know, the Macroves and the demonic. But despite
Speaker 4: the parallels with Weston there, it's Divine who is one
Speaker 4: of the who shows up in this book, which I
Speaker 4: find interesting and at first, like the first couple of
Speaker 4: times reading this book, I felt like there was kind
Speaker 4: of a, I don't know, a dis jointedness in Divine's
Speaker 4: character between Out of the Silent Planet and this book,
Speaker 4: because in the first book he's portrayed is just being
Speaker 4: this he's just self absorber, reading he wants the gold,
Speaker 4: you know, very different from Weston, who, as eli Ursa says,
Speaker 4: is you know, he is seeking something outside of himself.
Speaker 4: It's not a good thing, but he's looking outside of
Speaker 4: himself or its west, whereas divine is just you know,
Speaker 4: looking into himself. But un for the reflectionery, I think
Speaker 4: that does track because even the most self absorbed people
Speaker 4: can be, you know, that stepping stone for evil to
Speaker 4: advance further. And I'm more than that. Even just you know,
Speaker 4: the average joe doing that thing is the pathway that
Speaker 4: you evil takes to advance. I feel like I had
Speaker 4: more on that topic that's elluded me. One interesting sort
Speaker 4: of side plot, like a peripheral thread in the book
Speaker 4: is the allusions to the moon, which we've talked about
Speaker 4: in our previous chats. In the course how you wish
Speaker 4: Lewis Head you really developed that further, maybe a short
Speaker 4: story or something. But even what we do get in
Speaker 4: the book is really interesting and it's really kind of
Speaker 4: tangential to the main plot, but you catch echoes of
Speaker 4: what's going on in the story. So he plays on
Speaker 4: the medieval idea that with the close side of the moon,
Speaker 4: you're the side that we see was corrupted when the
Speaker 4: fall of man and has fallen into decay. Well, the
Speaker 4: fire side, you know, is sort of untouched bison, and
Speaker 4: is you know, in the glory is the rest of
Speaker 4: the heavens. You may get that scene with Philistrato where
Speaker 4: he opens the curtains lets the moon light in, and
Speaker 4: he talks about how clean the near side of the
Speaker 4: moon is and how the fireside, which is your fertile
Speaker 4: it has dirt and life and death on it, and
Speaker 4: he wants to sort of clean up those dirty patches
Speaker 4: on the fire side of the moon. And Ransom gives
Speaker 4: a really interesting description of it, which I'll read here.
Speaker 4: When he's talking to Merlin. One of the questions Merlin
Speaker 4: asks is who was called who is called Solva? What
Speaker 4: road does she walk? Why is the womb barren on
Speaker 4: one side? Where are the cold marriages? Ransom replied, Solva?
Speaker 4: Is she who more turtles call the moon? She walks
Speaker 4: in the lowest sphere. The rim of the world that
Speaker 4: was wasted goes through her. Half of her orb is
Speaker 4: turned towards us and shares our curse. Her other half
Speaker 4: looks to deep heaven. Happy would he be? Who could
Speaker 4: cross that frontier and see the fields on her further side?
Speaker 4: On this side, the womb is barren, and the marriage
Speaker 4: is cold. There, dwell and accursed people full of pride
Speaker 4: and lust. There, when a young man takes a maiden
Speaker 4: in marriage, they do not lie together, but each lies
Speaker 4: with a cunningly fashioned image of the others, made to
Speaker 4: move and to be warm by devilish arts. For real
Speaker 4: flesh will not please them. They are so dainty delicti
Speaker 4: in their dreams of lust. Their real children they fabricate
Speaker 4: by vile arts in a secret place. Don't think I
Speaker 4: even have to comment comment too much on that. You
Speaker 4: can see see parallels to what's going on, to the
Speaker 4: story and the broader social commentary that Lewis is making.
Speaker 4: There's a lot to impact just in that quote. One
Speaker 4: final thing that I'll say, so, I've sometimes seen a
Speaker 4: quote taken out of context from the end of the book.
Speaker 4: I don't have it open in front of me at
Speaker 4: the moment, but it's something to the effect of Jane
Speaker 4: no longer had dreams, she had children instead. And I've
Speaker 4: seen that taken completely out of context, you know, and
Speaker 4: itself sounds like I mean something very different, and people
Speaker 4: use this, you know, and accusations of misogyny against Lewis.
Speaker 4: But no, the context of the quote is she's no
Speaker 4: longer having, you know, psychic nightmares. It's a good thing
Speaker 4: that she's not having these dreams.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a good point. Luis is not saying she
Speaker 1: doesn't have aspirations anymore because now she has kids, that's over. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So that's a good correction point. Yeah. And so obviously
Speaker 1: you covered a lot of ground there, and I don't
Speaker 1: feel need to comment on all of it, but I
Speaker 1: do find it interesting the way that we see the
Speaker 1: progression here from these early college meetings about budgets that
Speaker 1: are then directly connected through this line down to Hell,
Speaker 1: that what seems very mundane actually has pretty sinister roots
Speaker 1: in it. And this makes me think of in The
Speaker 1: Great Divorce, where we see that, or where we're told
Speaker 1: that heaven and Hell tend to work their way backwards.
Speaker 1: And so the progressive element of Edgstow is very much
Speaker 1: an agent of Hell as much as weather and Frostar.
Speaker 1: In other words, there are no morally ambiguous situations here
Speaker 1: that Lewis is providing us. Everything is connected to the
Speaker 1: heavenly or to the hellish. And then even the moon
Speaker 1: is kind of this ambiguous reality, and that it has
Speaker 1: one face toward the heavens and one face toward the earth,
Speaker 1: which why is the light side and a dark side?
Speaker 1: It is this transition point. It is kind of ambiguous,
Speaker 1: and I think this is why back in Perilandra, when
Speaker 1: they're describing the apocalypse that's waiting Earth leading up to
Speaker 1: its real beginning, we're told that the moon is going
Speaker 1: to be shattered and that its rocks are going to
Speaker 1: fall into the seas, which, by the way, is exactly
Speaker 1: what happens in the last battle. The moon is shattered
Speaker 1: and the rocks fall into the seas, and so we
Speaker 1: see that direct connection there, And I think it's the
Speaker 1: idea that all moral ambiguity is going to be utterly
Speaker 1: destroyed when the light meets with the darkness. And so
Speaker 1: this kind of meandering, chaotic, ambiguous nature that we see
Speaker 1: in so much of that hideous strength eventually is going
Speaker 1: to be revealed as not being ambiguous at all, and
Speaker 1: fact that it never was. Now, as far as Divine goes,
Speaker 1: I think that he really does serve as the faux
Speaker 1: masculine for Mark in particular, Mark who at the beginning
Speaker 1: of the story and for most of the story, is
Speaker 1: not properly related to the true masculine spirit. He doesn't
Speaker 1: know how to assert himself. He just keeps receiving whatever
Speaker 1: is given to him. And this is one reason why
Speaker 1: he's drawn to Feverstone to divine and even that name
Speaker 1: Feverstone has this idea of okay, you have fever. It's
Speaker 1: fast moving, it's acting, it's heated. But also Stone, it
Speaker 1: asserts itself. And so it is a kind of faux
Speaker 1: Malachandrey in a faux martial spirit that is meant to
Speaker 1: entice Mark to a false version of what he is
Speaker 1: called to be. And so he's just enamored by Faverstone,
Speaker 1: by the fast cars, by his laughter, by his aggressive attitude.
Speaker 1: And I think that in the story that's really the
Speaker 1: role that he plays. He is the false Malachandrean influence.
Speaker 1: And I do see some continuity with his character here
Speaker 1: and out of the Silent Planet, and that in both
Speaker 1: cases he's just this self absorbed guy who's out for
Speaker 1: material goods. And even in that hideous strength, you know,
Speaker 1: he'll spout some of the progressive, nice talking points, but
Speaker 1: he's not really a philosopher, right, He's not in it
Speaker 1: for anything beyond himself, which is why he has no
Speaker 1: problem at the end, just hopping in the car and
Speaker 1: speeding off. And then you know, the other reason he's
Speaker 1: okay with that car getting smashed up is well, it
Speaker 1: wasn't his, So he's still just this self absorbed materialistic
Speaker 1: guy who has this faux masculinity about him. Yeah, I'll
Speaker 1: leave it there. When you keep moving, Chase, what do
Speaker 1: you have for us?
Speaker 3: Yes, I missed a little bit of some people's but
Speaker 3: one of the big things that spoke to me that
Speaker 3: you made clear up was with the Inner Ring and
Speaker 3: just viewing it as like as like young man, we
Speaker 3: all like desired to be part of some community of
Speaker 3: some like successful group, and along comes just like a
Speaker 3: group that's not good, but from the outside it looks
Speaker 3: like it's the best thing we could be a part of.
Speaker 3: And that's what we see with Mark is wanting to
Speaker 3: be a part of this, and meanwhile he's missing out
Speaker 3: on the actual good in a ring for this fake
Speaker 3: one that's flashy and and it just kind of like
Speaker 3: speaks to the pride of of like younger men and
Speaker 3: that every man goes through like thinking they know a
Speaker 3: lot and then not listening to older men who have
Speaker 3: been through it, who have you know, like mister Dimple
Speaker 3: was trying to talk to him, but you know, everyone
Speaker 3: has faults and they can't quite match up, and and
Speaker 3: so you know they're they're pushed apart and it just
Speaker 3: drives him back. But thankfully he gets gets kind of
Speaker 3: hits rock bottom. And also just the scene with the
Speaker 3: with the crucifix and and just his conversion there at
Speaker 3: the end is so great seeing him just like know
Speaker 3: that it's wrong and having like a puddicle un moment
Speaker 3: of of like, you know, I even if it's you know,
Speaker 3: not like it's not true or it's it's not real,
Speaker 3: or it's just a historical thing, like I'm not going
Speaker 3: to do it because you know, like probably I'm was saying,
Speaker 3: like I would want to live like an There is
Speaker 3: no Garian. So that was that was cool.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that is such a great moment, And so towards
Speaker 1: the end of the book where at this point Mark
Speaker 1: recognizes that and I see is evil. He wants nothing
Speaker 1: to do with these people, but he's been put through
Speaker 1: this training programs deprogramming program probably a better way to
Speaker 1: phrase that, where he's there trying to put him through
Speaker 1: all of these rooms where the aesthetics are just like
Speaker 1: a little bit off, or they're grotesque, or they're trying
Speaker 1: to get rid of his sense of beauty, the sense
Speaker 1: of the real. And then as a final part of
Speaker 1: this experiment, he's told to trample on and deface this
Speaker 1: crucifix the symmes of the crucified Christ. And this is
Speaker 1: a major turning point for him. He'd already started to
Speaker 1: get the suspicion that, okay, maybe he's revolted by all
Speaker 1: these images because there actually is something like the normal. Well,
Speaker 1: now that really comes to a point when he's faced
Speaker 1: to with with defacing this crucifix, and he kind of
Speaker 1: has this idea of what did Christ ever do to me?
Speaker 1: Why am I doing this? And then he just he
Speaker 1: continues to meditate on it, and he starts to recognize that, Okay,
Speaker 1: the crucifixion of Christ is what happens when the strait
Speaker 1: meets the bent, and he says that it was the
Speaker 1: bellbury of christ Day that led to the crucifixion, and
Speaker 1: he doesn't want to be any part of that. And
Speaker 1: so this point, he doesn't have any clear doctrine to
Speaker 1: stand on. He doesn't know what's objectively true, but he
Speaker 1: knows that given the option between the crucified Christ and
Speaker 1: the crucifiers, He's going to choose the Christ right, He's
Speaker 1: going to choose what he calls the normal. He's going
Speaker 1: to choose the real, the strait, even if there is
Speaker 1: no straight as you said, it's a very puddle glum
Speaker 1: type of moment. And Lewis talks about in myth became
Speaker 1: fact that given somebody who believes that Christianity is objectively true,
Speaker 1: factually true, but doesn't actually move them, and then you
Speaker 1: have somebody who believes the myth of Christianity but they're
Speaker 1: not necessarily firm on the factuality of it. He said,
Speaker 1: the person who chooses the myth is probably better off
Speaker 1: because at least that's going to animate them. Now, to
Speaker 1: be clear, the fact matters, and that's Lewis is not
Speaker 1: degrading that. But his point is that fact alone isn't
Speaker 1: going to move you. You need to embrace the moving
Speaker 1: reality of who Christ is and what Christ stands for,
Speaker 1: what Christ is done. And it's that story that's going
Speaker 1: to contextualize your life. And so he very much has
Speaker 1: that sense of the story is starting to make sense
Speaker 1: to him, though he doesn't yet have the fact in mind,
Speaker 1: and that's not necessarily a bad place to start, all right, Jackie,
Speaker 1: go ahead.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I thought that it was really interesting. I just
Speaker 5: noticed this. I think that David and Jordan might have
Speaker 5: both hit on this in Peralandra. But we're told over
Speaker 5: and over again that Ransom shouldn't depend on his own strength,
Speaker 5: and he doesn't have to take these things on his shoulders.
Speaker 5: But here, in that hideous strength, Ransom is at the
Speaker 5: center of the opposition of the good side, I guess
Speaker 5: to be a little more clear, and he is holding
Speaker 5: them all together, and he is communicating with the higher powers,
Speaker 5: and he is then dispersing their orders to his team.
Speaker 5: I don't know for a better word, but we get
Speaker 5: that Jane observes that his shoulders could have held up
Speaker 5: the whole house when she sees him, and she recognizes
Speaker 5: his strength instantly. But he's also in a facilitator role.
Speaker 5: Really in this book. He's not involved in any of
Speaker 5: the actual action when it comes to opposing the powers
Speaker 5: of darkness, but he is organizing all of the efforts
Speaker 5: to uphold goodness. So I thought that was really interesting
Speaker 5: to see how his arc completes itself. You know, he's
Speaker 5: been wounded in this epic battle on Perilandra and so
Speaker 5: he can't take place in the epic battle here on Earth.
Speaker 5: I thought that that was kind of fun.
Speaker 1: Right, And even at the end, you know, McPhee comments, who,
Speaker 1: I know, we haven't even talked about him. But McPhee says,
Speaker 1: so what did we actually do here? You know, the
Speaker 1: main characters don't actually do anything. I mean, they do stuff,
Speaker 1: but they don't really bring the victory. And McPhee said,
Speaker 1: we're here just like guardening, like, what do we actually do?
Speaker 1: And the whole point is that their job was not
Speaker 1: to really do anything. Their job was to receive and
Speaker 1: to be glad, not to be those who are going
Speaker 1: to achieve merit, but those who are going to simply
Speaker 1: receive what essentially what God is doing. God is going
Speaker 1: to bring the victory here. In fact, there's this great
Speaker 1: scene where Mertlin is talking to Ransom about what's going
Speaker 1: to happen, and Ransom says, you know, basically, the gods
Speaker 1: are going to descend and they're going to take care
Speaker 1: of this, and Merlin says, well, hold up, there's got
Speaker 1: to be a better way that we can manage this.
Speaker 1: You know, what about the King wins, and Rasom says, well,
Speaker 1: he doesn't really have any actual authority. So then, you know,
Speaker 1: Merlin says, okay, well let's just overthrow them, right, I mean,
Speaker 1: you're sitting in the seat of Arthur here, let's just
Speaker 1: go take over. And Rasom says, we're like four people
Speaker 1: and a bear. They keep going back and forth, and
Speaker 1: Merlin just keeps appealing to all of these worldly powers. Okay,
Speaker 1: you know, what about some Christian prince, Well, there aren't anymore. Okay,
Speaker 1: what about the emperor? There is no emperor. Well what
Speaker 1: about you know somebody from the east. Well, the West
Speaker 1: has already exported s filled throughout the world, and so
Speaker 1: there's really nowhere else to go. And it very much
Speaker 1: is giving us this. There is no other stream type
Speaker 1: of conversation, right to go to the beginning of the
Speaker 1: Silver Chair, where it's all or nothing. We have to
Speaker 1: cast ourselves before the power and the goodness and the
Speaker 1: all sufficiency of God or we have nothing. That's it.
Speaker 1: There is no other stream, and so it really just
Speaker 1: continue this trajectory that we've seen throughout the series that
Speaker 1: our job is not necessarily to be to the hero
Speaker 1: or I guess what we should say, is the heroic
Speaker 1: thing for us to do is to receive, receive that
Speaker 1: the wave that Malodle is sending us. That's all we
Speaker 1: are called to do, or as Ransom, systemicfee. Sometimes we
Speaker 1: need to build an alter in one place for the
Speaker 1: fire to descend on another. And so that's our job,
Speaker 1: simply to be faithful through our faithfulness, through our receiving.
Speaker 1: I mean, that's how we actually gain substance, not something
Speaker 1: we can create on our own, as opposed to what
Speaker 1: you see in the nice where the head is literally
Speaker 1: this disembodied head, literally a man without a chest. Right,
Speaker 1: it's all intellect, it's all rationality with no actual grounding, which,
Speaker 1: as as Testererston says, that's how you get insanity, where
Speaker 1: you could have somebody who is very logical but still insane.
Speaker 1: They're not grounded in reality as opposed to the reality
Speaker 1: that we get through relationship with deep Heaven. All right, Well,
Speaker 1: anything else that anyone wants to say about that hideous strength.
Speaker 6: I was thinking about you talking about just being on
Speaker 6: the side of good and how earlier early in the book,
Speaker 6: Mark and Featherstone are talking where Featherstone describes Ransom as
Speaker 6: a respectable Cambridge Dawn with weak eyes, a game leg
Speaker 6: and a fair beard, and says he killed Weston for
Speaker 6: being on our side. And he says, you and I
Speaker 6: don't like being ponds and we do rather like fighting,
Speaker 6: especially on the winning side. And that part we were
Speaker 6: talking about later where Mark is asked to step on
Speaker 6: essentially like the the fumie from the Japanese Tokugawa Shoguna,
Speaker 6: to root out the Christians, that's when he has that
Speaker 6: realization that no, it's it's not what's a value of
Speaker 6: being on the winning side? If it is not the
Speaker 6: right side, it would be better, you know, even if
Speaker 6: supposing the strait was utterly powerless, always and everywhere, certain
Speaker 6: to be mocked, tortured and finally killed by the crooked
Speaker 6: what then why not go down with the ship? And
Speaker 6: I love how he ends that because his fear vanishes
Speaker 6: that has protected him from doing foolish things all his life.
Speaker 6: And he says, it's all bloody nonsense and I'm damned
Speaker 6: if I do any such thing. And I feel like
Speaker 6: that was a big his big turning point in realizing
Speaker 6: that winning isn't everything. Being on the right side and
Speaker 6: dying for the right side is much more valuable than winning.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and that's where we, I think, really get this
Speaker 1: redeemed northern spirit that is so important for Tolkien, so
Speaker 1: important for Lewis. You can think of several quotes from Narnia,
Speaker 1: like when you know, Rillian says that whether we live
Speaker 1: or die as then will be our good Lord. Is
Speaker 1: kind of mentality where consequences don't matter. What matters is
Speaker 1: our relationship with the good. As even Socrates says in
Speaker 1: the Apology as he's looking down the court of Athens
Speaker 1: that is now condemning him, and he says that you
Speaker 1: cannot do harm to a good man. It's the same
Speaker 1: basic idea. Even if you kill me, well, that is
Speaker 1: nothing to my relationship with goodness. And so that is
Speaker 1: where we stand. That is where we live and die
Speaker 1: in the most important sense. As Augustine says, you know,
Speaker 1: let me see your face. Even if I die, lest
Speaker 1: I die, all that matters is that relationship with with God,
Speaker 1: with with the Ultimate, with Goodness itself. Heaven is what
Speaker 1: remains when everything else is shaken. Anybody else want to
Speaker 1: I don't want to cut anyone off, but I know
Speaker 1: we've been going for a while. Anyone else want to
Speaker 1: say anything else about this book or anything Ransom related.
Speaker 4: I just want to take a moment of appreciation for
Speaker 4: mister Bultitude. I love mister Bultitude.
Speaker 1: Yes, it is kind of fun. I guess also speaks
Speaker 1: to some of the things we've been talking about. The
Speaker 1: Demonic Head and you know, the top of the nice
Speaker 1: is undone, not by Ransom, not even by Mertlin, but
Speaker 1: bye a Bear. I think it just I don't even
Speaker 1: really know what else to say about that, other than
Speaker 1: I guess to go Chris Farley on it. You know
Speaker 1: that was that was awesome. Well, if there's nothing else,
Speaker 1: I obviously there's so much more we could talk about,
Speaker 1: but we've been going on for a while and so
Speaker 1: we'll go ahead and wrap it. I definitely appreciate everyone
Speaker 1: showing up again, and maybe sometime in the future we
Speaker 1: can do something else Lewis related. I would love to
Speaker 1: do that, but for now, we'll go ahead and sign off.
Speaker 1: So thanks a bunch, Thank you, sing all again. I hope, yep,
Speaker 1: definitely we'll do something again sometime.
Speaker 2: Yes, this was great, lots of fun.
Speaker 1: Thank you for joining us for this conversation. I hope
Speaker 1: that you enjoyed it. And as I know that I did.
Speaker 1: Now before we go, I do have a recommended for
Speaker 1: you in addition to obviously the Ransom series by C. S. Lewis,
Speaker 1: and then I need to touch on some Patreon stuff.
Speaker 1: So today I would like to recommend to you Tom
Speaker 1: Shippy's translation of Beowulf. I've read three different translations of
Speaker 1: Beowulf now and I think that this is now my
Speaker 1: go to recommendation for a first read. It's very approachable
Speaker 1: without being condescending, and his commentary is very helpful and
Speaker 1: it's very user friendly. Now, once you finish that, I
Speaker 1: would then recommend that you turn to Tolkien's, which is
Speaker 1: a prose translation, and for that reason alone it likely
Speaker 1: should not be your first move with what is a poem,
Speaker 1: but his language, Tolkien's language is so heavy and strong
Speaker 1: and semi archaic that I believe it does an excellent
Speaker 1: job of portraying the mood of the story. Also, his
Speaker 1: commentary is far more dense than Shippy's, and so you
Speaker 1: have to wordly wade through it. You have to work
Speaker 1: through it a bit more, especially if you don't know
Speaker 1: Anglo Saxon. A lot of times talkiing will go off
Speaker 1: on some word nerdary there, and I don't know Anglo
Speaker 1: Saxon myself, at least not yet. I hope to change
Speaker 1: it at some point in the relatively near future. But
Speaker 1: even if you don't follow all of his linguistic analysis,
Speaker 1: there's still a great deal of gold to be found
Speaker 1: in those minds, more so than I found elsewhere, And
Speaker 1: so start with Shippy and then go to Tolkien. Now,
Speaker 1: as always, if you appreciate what I do, I humbly
Speaker 1: welcome your support on Patreon. Your level of involvement over
Speaker 1: there is entirely up to you, as we have some
Speaker 1: patrons who are very involved and some who are just
Speaker 1: silent supporters. And know that I appreciate both sides of
Speaker 1: that spectrum and everywhere in between very greatly, as I
Speaker 1: could not do this without you. If you would like
Speaker 1: to support my work, this podcast, and everything else that
Speaker 1: I do, you can go to patreon dot com slash
Speaker 1: Mythic Mind, and thank you to all of my current supporters,
Speaker 1: specifically at the second tier or higher, and that's Mark Cliff, Aaron, Josh,
Speaker 1: Paul William, Aaron Aaron, Andrew Brandon, Christopher Clinton and Me Harrison,
Speaker 1: Ian Jamie, Jeremiah Jocelyn, Joshua Landon, Paul Matthew, Patrick and Steele,
Speaker 1: and of course thank you to all of my Tier
Speaker 1: one patrons as well and friends. I really do want
Speaker 1: to emphasize how much I appreciate you and how much
Speaker 1: I appreciate that this list is getting longer on a
Speaker 1: regular basis. There are definitely some exciting things in the future,
Speaker 1: and some of those things are closer than others. For example,
Speaker 1: we're about to begin our first Mythic Mind book club
Speaker 1: on the Poetic Eda, which is one of our primary
Speaker 1: sources for information about Norse mythology and heroic legends. This
Speaker 1: book club includes ongoing discord chats, a Patreon exclusive podcast,
Speaker 1: and monthly live chats for the Mythic Mind Fellowship podcast.
Speaker 1: If you would like to get involved, then go ahead
Speaker 1: and become a patron at any level, and I would
Speaker 1: be glad to have you join us. But that's different
Speaker 1: now until next time, godspeed. You may have noticed that
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