S6E11 – OSP 11 – “The Quiet Place”

Ransom finds out what the hrossa know about Earth…

S6E10: “The Quiet Place” (Download)

Show Notes

Introduction

Drop-In

• Mike Aquilina

Quote-of-the-week

[Ransom] was quite unable to point Earth out to them in the night sky. They seemed surprised at his inability, and repeatedly pointed out to him a bright planet low on the western horizon… [He asked] them the name of the bright southern planet, and was told that it was Thulcandra—the silent world or planet.

C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet (Chapter 11)

Episode Movie Title

Chit-Chat

• Andrew
  • The Common Room
  • Writing an Easter article for the Diocese, writing a sermon, presiding at a funeral, …
  • Shows off his Miles Morris pen:

• David
  • PWC listeners will already have known she’s pregnant, but I’m happy to say that at the time of recording, my wife Marie has just entered her 2nd Trimester of pregnancy!
  • I’m actually just starting to get back into Peloton. Ride with me on Peloton – @davidlewisbates and if you don’t have a Peloton bike yet and are thinking of getting one, please reach out via our website since I have a referral code for $200 off.

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• Matt
  • Favourite Pelton instructor, Leanne Hainsby has cancer. Please spare a prayer for her today.

Toast

• Drinks
  • David, Matt, and Andrew were drinking Caol Ila 12
• Foreign language “cheers”
  • “Cin cin!” (Italian)
• Patreon toast
  • Jocelyn Jaquiery

Story Recap

Ransom finds himself on an unexpected journey, starting with a simple walk. He was transported against his will by Weston and Devine to a foreign planet. He slowly pieces together that he is an offering for some local creatures but doesn’t know much about them. He’s afraid, but curious. After landing, when some of the foreign creatures were coming his way, he found an opportunity to run away through what is like a forest. He now finds himself encountering a local species called the Hross and is learning more about the local land.

The story so far…

Philology So Far…

• David tested Matt on his Malacandrian…
  • Handra: The ground, land, or planet
  • Handramit: Valley (literally “low earth”)
  • Harandra: Mountain or plateau (literally “high earth”)
  • Hman (singular) / hmana (plural): Man/Men
  • Sorn (singular)/ séroni (plural): The race of tall, feathered creatures who are scholars
  • Hross (singular male) / Hressni (singular female) / hrossa (plural): The race of creatures that look like otters who love farming, hunting and art.

Discussion

1. “Martian Living”

• Ted Lasso’s “Don’t judge, be Curious” scene.
• Getting “Dances with Wolves” / “Avatar” vibes from this book!

Of course you are right; if we are to treat it as a story you must telescope the time I spent in the village during which ‘nothing happened.’ But I grudge it. Those quiet weeks, the mere living among the hrossa, are to me the main thing that happened.

C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet (Postscript)

Even the pinkish-white weed which covered the whole handramit was edible at a pinch, so that if he had starved before Hyoi found him he would have starved amidst abundance. No hross, however,  ate the weed (honodraskrud) for choice, though it might be used faute de mieux on a journey.

C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet (Chapter 11)

The cubs, on their part, felt the liveliest interest in the hairless goblin which had appeared among them. With them, and therefore indirectly with their dams, he was a brilliant success.

C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet (Chapter 11)

2. “The Silent Planet”

Ransom, who had deliberately given a childish version of the truth in order to adapt it to the supposed ignorance of his audience, was a little annoyed to find Hnohra painfully explaining to him that he could not live in the sky because there was no air in it; he might have come through the sky but he must have come from a handra.

C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet (Chapter 11)

• The Everlasting Man by G.K. Chesterton
  • Episode 36: The Everlasting Man: The Plan for This Book & Ch. 1
• “Thulcandra” means the silent world or planet.
• I think the three-piece band Andrew to which Andrew refers is King’s X.

3. “Hross Metaphysics”

• “Oyarsa” is the ruling creature of the planet who lives at “Meldilorn”. It’s also suggested that he’s almost omniscient and eternal. He is something other than a Hross or Sorn. He did not make the world.
  • The name “Oyarsa” comes from Bernardus Silvestris, 12th Century Platonist, used to describe the tutelary spirit, higher order angel of a planet.
• The world was made and ruled by “Maleldil the Young” who lives with “the Old One” who is apparently “not that sort…that…has to live anywhere”.

It became plain that Maleldil was a spirit without body, parts or passions.

‘He is not a hnau,’ said the hrossa.

C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet (Chapter 11)

• This relates to the doctrines of Classical Theism and our listener Matt had some excellent clarifying points on this subject:

Hey all, enjoying this weeks episode as usual. However, I’ve just paused after the discussion about ‘passions’, and wanted to clarify some bits as if it’s left where you leave it I think it could easily be misheard.

It’s been noted before (I think on the show?) that passion comes from the Latin word passio, meaning ‘suffering’. If this meaning of passion is taken, then yes, Andrew is correct. Traditionally it is taught that Jesus can succumb to passion, but that the eternal Son cannot as he is impassable (this means he’s unable to suffer). The reason being is that it would infer that the Eternal Son could change, causing all sorts of theological nightmares and simultaneously denying what is known as divineimmutability (this means that God cannot change).

Now, IMPORTANTLY, many of the Church fathers would also say that Jesus DOES NOT have passions, if it is meant in the way they usually speak about them. The Fathers speak of passions as enemies of faith, as they are actions, thoughts, motives and desires which fundamentally have their source in our sinful ego, building up ways of being in us which mean we miss God and chase after something other than him for ultimate satisfaction.

As Christopher Hall points out:

“A passionate person, then, in the ancient meaning of the term, might well be someone who by all appearances is emotionally flat, uninvolved and unengaged. Just as easily, a passionate person could be emotionally lively and vibrant. The mark of the passions in a human personality is not the strength or weakness of one’s feelings. It is rather the habitual misdirection of desire [Italics original], the tendency to identify things as important, as worthy of pursuit or emulation, that are genuinely unimportant and indifferent matters—if not downright detrimental to one’s physical, emotional, and spiritual health.”

Let this never be said of Jesus … he was not passionate in the way we are, hence the Chalcedonian definition saying “…[that Christ is] with us according to his humanity, like us in all things except sin.”  Passions for the early church were inherently sinful, therefore Jesus cannot posses them.

So, hopefully this is a helpful clarification for everybody. Perhaps nobody thought of the potential minefield which could occur when somebody says ‘Jesus has passions’ – but what we say is sometimes not what people hear! If we are learning anything this season, it’s that language is important!

Listener Matt Banks, Slack Channel

• Ransom discovers that he is the one being taught theology!

But he followed enough to feel once more a certain irritation. Ever since he had discovered the rationality of the hrossa he had been haunted by a conscientious scruple as to whether it might not be his duty to undertake their religious instruction; now, as a result of his tentative efforts, he found himself being treated as if he were the savage and being given a first sketch of civilized religion—a sort of hrossian equivalent of the shorter catechism.

C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet (Chapter 11)

• What does “hnau” mean?
  • A rational creature made in the image and likeness of God?
  • The OSP Wiki says “Hnau or nau are intelligent lifeforms, believed to have spiritual qualities and a physical body. They have free will and a moral conscience.”
  • This concept is refined later in this book, and also in Perelandra
  • CSL suggests in his letters that the word is influenced from the Greek word “Nous” for “mind”.
  • We’re told that, while the other races on the planet are “hnau”, Maleldil is not.

Supposing there were, have any of these animals what we call “rational souls’? By this I include not merely the faculty to abstract and calculate, but the apprehension of values, the power to mean by “good” something more than “good for me” or even “good for my species/’ If instead of asking, “Have they rational souls?” you prefer to ask, “Are they spiritual animals?” I think we shall both mean pretty much the same. If the answer to either question should be No, then of course it would not be at all strange that our species should be treated differently from theirs.

C.S. Lewis, Religion and Rocketry (1958)

¹⁷ To Adam he said, “Because you listened to your wife and ate fruit from the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You must not eat from it,’

“Cursed is the ground because of you;
    through painful toil you will eat food from it
    all the days of your life.
¹⁸ It will produce thorns and thistles for you,
    and you will eat the plants of the field.
¹⁹ By the sweat of your brow
    you will eat your food
until you return to the ground,
    since from it you were taken;
for dust you are
    and to dust you will return.”

Genesis 3:17-19

²² We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time.

Romans 8:22

• Mars Silvanus

4. “The pfifltriggi”

• The pfifltriggi sound like Dwarves in Lord of the Rings – smaller in stature, they’re engineers and craftsmen. They make things out of gold (Arbol hru, “Sun’s blood”). They’re described as “tapir-headed, frog-bodied animals”.
• The planet is arranged in a similar fashion to Plato’s republic:
  • Sorns are the Philosophers
  • Hrossa are the soldiers
  • Pfifltriggi are the craftsmen
• The description of the Malacandrian races is reminiscent of St. Paul’s description of the Body of Christ:

Now if the foot should say, “Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,” it would not for that reason stop being part of the body.

1 Corinthians 12:15

5. “Who rules?”

We say that people are proud of being rich, or clever, or good-looking, but they are not. They are proud of being richer, or cleverer, or better-looking than others.

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Book III, Chapter 8)

• Mars has a gravity which is 38% that of Earth.

He tried to ask what would happen if the sorns used their wisdom to make the hrossa do things—this was as far as he could get in his halting Malacandrian. The question did not sound nearly so urgent in this form as it would have done if he had been able to say ‘used their scientific resources for the exploitation of their uncivilized neighbours.’

C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet (Chapter 11)

What emerged finally was that the séroni or sorns were perfectly helpless in a boat, and could not fish to save their lives, could hardly swim, could make no poetry, and even when hrossa had made it for them could understand only the inferior sorts; but they were admittedly good at finding out things about the stars and understanding the darker utterances of Oyarsa and telling what happened in Malacandra long ago—longer ago than anyone could remember.

C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet (Chapter 11)

6. “Tales from Earth”

Naturally his conversations with the hrossa did not all turn on Malacandra. He had to repay them with information about Earth. He was hampered in this both by the humiliating discoveries which he was constantly making of his own ignorance about his native planet, and partly by his determination to conceal some of the truth. He did not want to tell them too much of our human wars and industrialisms

C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet (Chapter 11)

7. “It came from the deep”

He [Ransom] wished to make himself useful, and was already beginning to have some vague capacity with the primitive hrossian tools.

C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet (Chapter 11)

8. “Touched by an angel”

• Hressni (singular female hross)
• The eldil are probably a new form of spiritual creature… We’ll come to find out that these are the angels of Malacandra.

Wrap-Up

Concluding Thoughts

• Since he’s already prepared for the next chapter, Matt will be leading again next week!
• The poets (hrossa, The Fox) in Lewis’ books are wise!

Question-of-the-week

Are you being drawn to this non-fallen(?) world?

Question-of-the-week

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