S8E16 – Perelandra – Chapter 13: “Deliver Us from Evil”

As the Un-man flees, Ransom follows in hot pursuit of his nemesis…

S8E16: Chapter 13 – “Deliver Us from Evil” (Download)

Show Notes

Introduction

Quote-of-the-Week

“Buck up, Weston. It’s only death, all said and done. We should have to die some day, you know. We shan’t lack water, and hunger–without thirst–isn’t too bad. As for drowning–well, a bayonet wound, or cancer, would be worse.”

C. S. Lewis, Ransom, Perelandra, Chapter Thirteen

Chit-Chat

• David has submitted his application to become naturalised in the United States! His green card has been extended in the meantime. Listeners, please send in some Budweisers to celebrate.
• Andrew has been speaking and travelling, and is still discerning his next church. Listener prayers are appreciated. Andrew was also approached by Harper Collins to write the banner article for their C. S. Lewis Substack for the month of March, which focuses on “Till We Have Faces”. The article will focus on why he believes that the novel is Lewis’ best work.
• David is also enjoying some vacation time. He’ll be spending it ice fishing with his kids and dodging January bugs that have been plaguing his home.
• Sorina Higgins wrote an article recently about future Inklings-related projects that needed to be completed.
• Coming soon is the 40th volume of the VII: Journal from the Wade Center, which talks about all seven of their authors, prominently, the Inklings. This will contain many unpublished Joy Davidman letters from 1952.
• Matt had his annual Colorado ski trip. His wife, though new to skiing, did very well, out of pure determination!

Toast

• Andrew was drinking the West Coast IPA from Best Day Brewing.
• David had the Round of Cheers NA Brute IPA from Athletic Brewing Co.
• Matt had a cuppa’ joe.

• In the absence of a Patreon supporter, let’s toast Greta Gerwig. Greta, please don’t mess this up… Cheers!

Discussion

Chapter Summary

Ransom pursues the Un-Man further out at sea. He sees mermen beneath the water eating seaweed, so Ransom tries some, but it makes him feel confused and overwhelmed.

Ransom then hears the voice of Weston, who seems to have regained control of his body, although he is confused and rants at some length. Ransom attempts to interject but without much success.

Weston then hears the sound of waves breaking and is terrified of being dashed to death on the rocks. Ransom pleads with him to ask God for forgiveness, but Weston grabs him and drags him down into the depths.

01. “Fight Recap”

–

02. “Under the Sea”

• The opening line to this chapter is beautiful:

Darkness fell upon the waves as suddenly as if it had been poured out of a bottle.

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Thirteen

• Ransom begins to concentrates on the sounds of the world, namely the beating fins of the fish and sloshing of the water.

As soon as the colours and the distances were thus taken away, sound and pain became more emphatic. The world was reduced to a dull ache, and sudden stabs, and the beating of the fish’s fins, and the monotonous yet infinitely varied noises of the water.

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Thirteen

• Ransom catches himself beginning to fall asleep from pure exhaustion and the adrenaline wearing away.

Then he found himself almost falling off the fish, recovered his seat with difficulty, and realised that he had been asleep, perhaps for hours. He foresaw that this danger would continually recur. After some consideration he levered himself painfully out of the narrow saddle behind its head and stretched his body at full length along the fish’s back. He parted his legs and wound them about the creature as far as he could and did the same with his arms, hoping that thus he could retain his mount even while sleeping.

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Thirteen

• Becoming more aware of his tired and injured state, he lays across the fish, and the fish’s movement relaxes him. Matt related the moment to a similar event in “Fourth Wing”.

After some consideration he levered himself painfully out of the narrow saddle behind its head and stretched his body at full length along the fish’s back. He parted his legs and wound them about the creature as far as he could and did the same with his arms, hoping that thus he could retain his mount even while sleeping. It was the best he could do. A strange thrilling sensation crept over him, communicated doubtless from the movement of its muscles. It gave him the illusion of sharing in its strong bestial life, as if he were himself becoming a fish.

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Thirteen

03. “Part of Your World”

Q. After some time, in a rather dream-like experience, Ransom finds himself staring into something like a human face. What’s he looking at and how does he respond?

• He’s looking at a merman! Both he and the creature are not frightened, but slightly uneasy and a little bemused.

He was not at all frightened, and he guessed that the creature’s reaction to him was the very same as his to it–an uneasy, though not hostile, bewilderment. Each was wholly irrelevant to the other. They met as the branches of different trees meet when the wind brings them together.

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Thirteen

• Ransom realises that there is more to this planet than just the people of the land: not unlike Lucy witnessing these creatures in Narnia, in “The Voyage of the Dawn Treader”, there is an underwater world unexplored by Lewis’ characters.
• When Ransom sees the merman eating some vegetation, he eats some for himself, and had a very strange experience, causing him to throw it away, despite having nothing else to eat:

The sight of their eating had reminded him that he was hungry and he was wondering whether the stuff they ate were eatable by him. It took him a long time, scooping the water with his fingers, to catch any of it. When at last he did it turned out to be of the same general structure as one of our smaller sea-weeds, and to have little bladders that popped when one pressed them. It was tough and slippery, but not salt like the weed of a Tellurian sea. What it tasted like, he could never properly describe … As soon as he had eaten a few mouthfuls of the seaweed he felt his mind oddly changed. He felt the surface of the sea to be the top of the world. He thought of the floating islands as we think of clouds; he saw them in imagination as they would appear from below–mats of fibre with long streamers hanging down from them, and became startlingly conscious of his own experience in walking on the topside of them as a miracle or a myth. He felt his memory of the Green Lady and all her promised descendants and all the issues which had occupied him ever since he came to Perelandra rapidly fading from his mind, as a dream fades when we wake, or as if it were shouldered aside by a whole world of interests and emotions to which he could give no name. It terrified him. In spite of his hunger he threw the rest of the weed away.

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Thirteen

• Andrew laughed at a comparison one could make between this scene and using drugs. David believed the seaweed served to show that “we are what we eat”. It gave Ransom a new perspective, similar to the children going underground in “The Silver Chair”.
• Joseph Weigel from the Men With Chests podcast has spoken a lot about this category of creature. In the sequel to this book, “That Hideous Strength”, we’re going to hear them described as “Neutrals”. When Ransom first saw them they were described as “neither bestial nor diabolic, but merely elvish, out of our orbit.”, so they aren’t humans, animals, or angels. In different places in his work he calls them “longaevi” (or long-livers/long-aged), elves, fairies, and elementals (connecting this to St. Paul’s comment in Colossians). If you’d like to know more about this, listen to his recent appearances on That Hideous CSL podcast, and keep your eyes open for Joseph’s upcoming book, “Planet Thulcandra”!

Q. What do you make of the last part, about them being irrelevant to each other?

• The hosts agree that these are separate stories, like two plots happening side by side.

04. “Les Poissons”

Q. We’re told that Ransom must have fallen asleep again because he woke to daylight. He realizes a few things which give him pause…

• The animals, including the herd of fish, begin to turn back.
• Ransom begins to realise the expanse of Perelandra, and that there might not be more floating islands!

It is a curious flaw in the reason, to judge from Ransom’s experience, that when a man comes to a strange planet he at first quite forgets its size. That whole world is so small in comparison with his journey through space that he forgets the distances within it: any two places in Mars, or in Venus, appear to him like places in the same town. But now, as Ransom looked round once more and saw nothing in every direction but golden sky and tumbling waves, the full absurdity of this delusion was borne in upon him.

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Thirteen

• It’s like departing eastward from Washington D. C.. There might be a whole lot of ocean before you reach land again!
• This section also goes to show that temptation and doubt are more likely to strike when you are hungry, angry, lonely, and tired!

Q. Ransom then seems to have something like a crisis of faith. What is it that troubles him?

• He wonders, given the size of the planet, if the King and Queen really hold these titles. Are they the true rulers of Perelandra? And could Perelandra truly be made for them if the majority of it could not be lived in or on by them? This is like the atheist argument about the scale of the universe. They would argue, “given how big the universe is, what makes you think it was made for us? What makes us humans special?” However, as Ransom comes to realize…

Was not the very idea naïve and anthropomorphic in the highest degree?

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Thirteen

05. “Weston’s Regress”

Q. After what seems to have been quite some time, Ransom is roused from his thoughts by a human voice, specifically the Un-man’s! How would you assess his state?

• It is in pitiable shape.

It sat hugging itself, its eyes almost shut up with bruises, its flesh the colour of liver, its leg apparently broken, its mouth twisted with pain.

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Thirteen

• As the fish swim closer together, Ransom comes to realise that it is no longer the creature of the Un-man that he is speaking to. Weston appears to have control of his body again, for the time being.

“Ransom,” it said again in a broken voice, “for God’s sake speak to me.”

C. S. Lewis, Weston, Perelandra, Chapter Thirteen

• Weston doesn’t seem to remember any of the events of the recent past. He doesn’t even appear to remember his journey to Perelandra. However, he appears to be contrite and frightened.

“Tell me what has happened. What have they done to us? You–you’re all bleeding. My leg’s broken . . .  We’ve had our quarrels, I know. I’m sorry. I dare say I’ve been in the wrong. Ransom, you’ll not leave me to die in this horrible place, will you?

C. S. Lewis, Weston, Perelandra, Chapter Thirteen

• It seems as though the demon has temporarily relinquished control of Weston in order to draw sympathy from Ransom and to further torture Weston. Knowing he can’t escape, the Un-man is using his host as bait.

Q. All the fish are gone except the ones Weston and Ransom are riding. When Weston discovers that his spacecraft has been lost, he’s terrified at the thought of being stuck on Perelandra and cries like a baby. How does Ransom handle him?

• Reminding Weston that in the war back on Thulcandra, soldiers are bravely facing their demise, Ransom tries to console Weston with the wisdom of death, encouraging him to make the right choice in the face of it.

“Come,” said Ransom at last, “there’s no good taking it like that. Hang it all, you’d not be much better off if you were on Earth. You remember they’re having a war there. The Germans may be bombing London to bits at this moment!” Then seeing the creature still crying, he added, “Buck up, Weston. It’s only death, all said and done. We should have to die some day, you know. We shan’t lack water, and hunger–without thirst–isn’t too bad. As for drowning–well, a bayonet wound, or cancer, would be worse.”

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Thirteen

• This attitude about death is something Lewis expresses elsewhere, in “Learning in Wartime”, “The Screwtape Letters”, and even in “Letters to an American Lady”. As it is something we all experience, it is something that we need to come to terms with.

Q. Weston makes Ransom promise that he won’t leave him, and then he asks him where “it” is, clearly referring to the Un-man. Ransom asks him if he knows, and also where he thinks he’s been for the past few days. Weston suddenly says “It’s all true, you know”. What’s he talking about?

• Weston has come to believe in a spiritual reality through this experience. But it’s not all good. The enemy is attempting to convince him of a spirituality that is entirely negative. He has also appeared to have experienced a kind of death already, or at least significant suffering. It is a foretaste of Hell.

“It’s all very well for you,” he said. “Drowning doesn’t hurt and death is bound to come anyway, and all that nonsense. What do you know about death? It’s all true, I tell you.”

C. S. Lewis, Weston, Perelandra, Chapter Thirteen

• It’s clear that Weston regrets his choices. But now his zeal to help humanity is gone.

“I’ve been stuffing myself up with a lot of nonsense all my life,” said Weston. “Trying to persuade myself that it matters what happens to the human race . . . trying to believe that anything you can do will make the universe bearable. It’s all rot, do you see?”
“And something else is truer!”
“Yes,” said Weston, and then was silent for a long time.

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Thirteen

• What Weston is failing to realise is that death is not the ultimate reality. Through the redemptive power of Christ, we are able to experience the true reality of Heaven if we accept Jesus as our Saviour.

06. “Poor Unfortunate Souls”

Q. Some time later, Weston tries to explain what’s “truer”. What does he mean?

• Weston believes that the terrors and sufferings of Hell are the ultimate reality.

“A little child that creeps upstairs when nobody’s looking and very slowly turns the handle to take one peep into the room where its grandmother’s dead body is laid out–and then runs away and has bad dreams. An enormous grandmother, you understand… that child knows something about the universe which all science and all religion is trying to hide…
Children are afraid to go through a churchyard at night… the children know better than the grown-ups. People in Central Africa doing beastly things with masks on in the middle of the night… [they] know more about the universe than the white people. Dirty priests in back streets in Dublin frightening half-witted children to death with stories about it. You’d say they are unenlightened. They’re not: except that they think there is a way of escape. There isn’t. That is the real universe, always has been, always will be. That’s what it all means.”

C. S. Lewis, Weston, Perelandra, Chapter Thirteen

Q. Given this, what does Weston think the only Good is?

• Living as long as your can! He’s like the Sadducees who denied the Resurrection from the dead. 

“That’s why it’s so important to live as long as you can. All the good things are now–a thin little rind of what we call life, put on for show, and then–the real universe for ever and ever. To thicken the rind by one centimetre–to live one week, one day, one half-hour longer–that’s the only thing that matters. Of course you don’t know it: but every man who is waiting to be hanged knows it. You say ‘What difference does a short reprieve make?’ What difference!!”

C. S. Lewis, Weston, Perelandra, Chapter Thirteen

• This striving for extended life will definitely make a reappearance in “That Hideous Strength”.
• Matt suggested that they all listen to the Brian Johnson (the Do Not Die Guy) documentary on the next common room, to talk about how AI and biohacking can become an unhealthy obsession with extending one’s life.

Q. Ransom says “But nobody need go there” – what’s he talking about?

• He’s talking about eternal damnation in Hell.

“Humanity as a whole knows better. It knows–Homer knew–that all the dead have sunk down into the inner darkness: under the rind. All witless, all twittering, gibbering, decaying. Bogeymen. Every savage knows that all ghosts hate the living who are still enjoying the rind: just as old women hate girls who still have their good looks. It’s quite right to be afraid of the ghosts. You’re going to be one all the same.”

C. S. Lewis, Ransom, Perelandra, Chapter Thirteen

• As Lewis has said in “Till We Have Faces”:

Die before you die. There is no chance after.

C. S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces

Q. What happens when Ransom tries to bring up God?

• Weston cherry-picks from scripture and perverts it to his own ends, choosing to remain blind to the redemptive acts of Christ.

“…There’s more sense in parts of the Bible than you religious people know. Doesn’t it say He’s the God of the living, not of the dead? That’s just it.”

C. S. Lewis, Weston, Perelandra, Chapter Thirteen

• Back to the Sadducees, this is the passage of scripture where Jesus is refuting them. The entire point of this is that the Fathers of faith are alive.
• However, unlike the Sadducees, Weston doesn’t seem to care if God exists or not, and that since everyone dies, God would only be present to the living. He seems to believe that God will not follow us there. However, the entire Christian message is that he did!

“If your God exists, He’s not in the globe–He’s outside, like a moon. As we pass into the interior we pass out of His ken. He doesn’t follow us in. You would express it by saying He’s not in time–which you think comforting! … He may be there in what you call ‘Life,’ or He may not. What difference does it make? We’re not going to be there for long!”

C. S. Lewis, Weston, Perelandra, Chapter Thirteen

Q. Ransom starts to give an argument from “Mere Christianity”. He says “That could hardly be the whole story… If the whole universe were like that, then we, being parts of it, would feel at home in such a universe. The very fact that it strikes us as monstrous—-“.  This is a mixture of the Argument From Desire and the Argument From Morality. However, Ransom doesn’t get to unpack it because Weston attacks Reason and Reality. How?

• Weston essentially says that reason is only legitimate while you are in this life, not in the afterlife. He’s falling into full-scale nihilism.

“Yes,” interrupted Weston, “that would be all very well if it wasn’t that reasoning itself is only valid as long as you stay in the rind. It has nothing to do with the real universe.”

C. S. Lewis, Weston, Perelandra, Chapter Thirteen

• He even goes as far as to say that reality is not rational!

“Even the ordinary scientists–like what I used to be myself–are beginning to find that out. Haven’t you seen the real meaning of all this modern stuff about the dangers of extrapolation and bent space and the indeterminacy of the atom? They don’t say it in so many words, of course, but what they’re getting to, even before they die nowadays, is what all men get to when they’re dead–the knowledge that reality is neither rational nor consistent nor anything else. In a sense you might say it isn’t there. ‘Real’ and ‘Unreal,’ ‘true’ and ‘false’–they’re all only on the surface. They give way the moment you press them.”

C. S. Lewis, Weston, Perelandra, Chapter Thirteen

• Ransom points out that if there is no meaning, than saying that there is no meaning is meaningless. The idea of meaningless is itself meaningless!

“If all this were true,” said Ransom, “what would be the point of saying it?”
“Or of anything else?” replied Weston. “The only point in anything is that there isn’t any point. Why do ghosts want to frighten? Because they are ghosts. What else is there to do?”

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Thirteen

• In a line very similar to one in “The Magician’s Nephew”, Ransom points out that how one views the universe depends upon perspective.

“I get the idea,” said Ransom. “That the account a man gives of the universe, or of any other building, depends very much on where he is standing.”

C. S. Lewis, Ransom, Perelandra, Chapter Thirteen

• Weston remains stuck in his Hellish mindset.

“But specially,” said Weston, “on whether he’s inside or out. All the things you like to dwell upon are outsides. A planet like our own, or like Perelandra, for instance. Or a beautiful human body. All the colours and pleasant shapes are merely where it ends, where it ceases to be. Inside, what do you get? Darkness, worms, heat, pressure, salt, suffocation, stink.”

C. S. Lewis, Weston, Perelandra, Chapter Thirteen

Q. Weston then sulkily says that Ransom doesn’t care, tellingly saying that he (Weston) has been pulled down below the rind, but Ransom has not yet. We might look nice even at our funeral, but we’re all worm-food in the end. Ransom tells him to shut up, but Weston then goes on to talk about Spiritualism – what does he have to say?

• He says that the afterworld is not nice, and then graphically describes what he means.

“Ectoplasm–slimy films coming out of a medium’s belly and making great, chaotic, tumbledown faces. Automatic writing producing reams of rubbish…”

C. S. Lewis, Weston, Perelandra, Chapter Thirteen

• Beginning to suspect that he is no longer speaking to Weston, Ransom replies:

“Don’t be angry,” said the voice. “There’s no good being angry with me. I thought you might be sorry. My God, Ransom, it’s awful. You don’t understand. Right down under layers and layers. Buried alive. You try to connect things and can’t. They take your head off . . . and you can’t even look back on what life was like in the rind, because you know it never did mean anything even from the beginning.”
“What are you?” cried Ransom. “How do you know what death is like? God knows, I’d help you if I could. But give me the facts. Where have you been these few days?”

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Thirteen

• Weston’s body suddenly says “what’s that?”…

07. “Fathoms Below”

Ransom listens, but can’t identify the new sound. As the waves and wind grows, his Weston starts to panic: “Oh, my God!” he cried. “Oh, Ransom, Ransom! We shall be killed. Killed and put back under the rind. Ransom, you promised to help me. Don’t let them get me again.” Weston realizes that they’re near land and fears that they’re going to be dashed to pieces. Then he says “O God, here comes the dark!” And the dark came. Horror of death such as he had never known, horror of the terrified creature at his side, descended upon Ransom: finally, horror with no definite object. All rather sounds like the Dark Island from Voyage of the Dawn Treader… 

Q. How does Ransom try to offer Weston some hope, Andrew?

• He tries in a desperate plea to call him to childlike repentance, one last chance:

“Are you there, Weston?” he shouted. “What cheer? Pull yourself together. All that stuff you’ve been talking is lunacy. Say a child’s prayer if you can’t say a man’s. Repent your sins. Take my hand. There are hundreds of mere boys on Earth facing death this moment. We’ll do very well.“

C. S. Lewis, Ransom, Perelandra, Chapter Thirteen

• There’s even a statement at the end similar to a parable in the gospel of Matthew:

His master said to him, ‘Well done, good and trustworthy slave; you have been trustworthy in a few things, I will put you in charge of many things; enter into the joy of your master.’

Matthew 25:23

• Then Weston grabs him…

“Let go. What the devil are you doing?”–and as he spoke strong arms had plucked him from the saddle, had wrapped him round in a terrible embrace just below his thighs, and, clutching uselessly at the smooth surface of the fish’s body, he was dragged down. The waters closed over his head: and still his enemy pulled him down into the warm depth, and down farther yet to where it was no longer warm.

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Thirteen

Wrap Up

Concluding Thoughts

• A surprising discovery was made this episode: Andrew has somehow found a young person to teach him ChatGPT!

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