Matt Jones' Random Acts of Verbiage

My first read through C.S. Lewis’ Space Trilogy has been really enjoyable. (You can see my post of the first of the series: Out of the Silent Planet and the final book in the series: That Hideous Strength) The other day I finished Perelandra and enjoyed it just as much of Silent Planet.

The story centers or Dr. Ransom, whose first adventure to Mars we read about in the first of the series, and his travels and experiences on Venus (or its true name, Perelandra). Perelandra is in an Edenic state and finally ready to be populated. Ransom has been sent there to help the Perelandrian Eve reject the Evil One.

At times, Eden could be overwhelming. Lewis’ descriptive abilities, even when talking about eating a new fruit, are quite substantial:

After a moment’s hesitation he put the little aperture to his lips. he had meant to extract the smallest, experimental sip, but the first taste put his caution all to flight. It was, of course, a taste, just as his thirst and hunger had been thirst and hunger. But then it was so different from every other taste that it seemed mere pedantry to call it a taste at all. It was like the discovery of a totally new genus of pleasures, something unheard of among men, out of all reckoning, beyond all covenant…. As he let the empty gourd fall from his hand and was about to pluck a second one, it came into his head that he was now neither hungry nor thirsty. And yet to repeat a pleasure so intense and almost so spiritual seemed an obvious thing to do….

The Evil One tries to introduce corruption to Perelandra at multiple levels, often coming as stories that would tempt the Green Lady (the Perelandrian Eve):

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

Sorry for the long blocks of text! There are so many more I want to put in! Really, you should just go read it for yourself. Finally I wanted to include something from a battle between Ransom and the Un-man.

Then [after fighting with the Un-man for a long period] an experience that perhaps no good man can ever have in our world came over him - a torrent of perfectly unmixed and lawful hatred. The energy of hating, never before felt without some guilt, without some dim knowledge taht he was failing fully to distinguish the sinner from the sin, rose into his arms and legs till he felt that they were pillars of burning blood. What was before him appeared no longer a creature of corrupted will. It was corruption itself to which will was attached only as an instrument. Ages ago it had been a Person: but the ruins of personality now survived in it only as weapons at the disposal of a furious self-exiled negation. It is perhaps difficult to understand why this filled Ransom not with horror but with a kind of joy. The joy came from finding at last what hatred was made for. As a boy with an axe rejoices on finding a tree, or a boy with a box of coloured chalks rejoices on finding a pile of perfectly white paper, so he rejoiced in the perfect congruity between his emotion and its object.

I love that Lewis calls the Evil One a “self-exiled negation”. As I was thinking about this passage, I came to realized that it would be lovely of our battles were this “easy” (although even this was not an easy battle). If we were able to not only distinguish the sin from the sinner, but to be able to battle only the sin and not the sinner, that would be something. The struggle of the Christian, and one that we often lose, is to not hurt those we see sinning by essentially condemning them. Our battle and beef is with the sin and not the sinner yet we cannot ignore the sinner. So how do we help remove sin without harming the sinner? Is any of this making sense? And just so you don’t crucify, when I say “sinner” I am referring to myself just as much as anyone else. We are all fallen and in need of redemption.