S6E16 – OSP 14+15 – “In the Heights”

Story Recap

Elwin Ransom is abducted by two men and taken to the planet Malacandra, in order to be given to a race of aliens called The Sorns. However, upon landing, they are attacked by an aquatic creature and he escapes in the confusion.

Ransom then encounters another race of inhabitants, The Hrossa, and he stays with them for some time. He helps them slay the water monster, only for one of their number to be shot by Ransom’s abductors. Our protagonist is then sent from the scene to seek an audience with the mysterious ruler of the planet, known as Oyarsa.

The story so far…

Discussion

1. “Fear & Fortitude”

Andrew saw some allusions to Dante’s Divine Comedy (David will be interviewing Dr. Jason Baxter about Dante later this season):

“In the middle of the journey of our life I came to myself within a dark wood where the straight way was lost. Ah, how hard a thing it is to tell what a wild, and rough, and stubborn wood this was, which in my thought renews the fear!”

Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy

Ransom decides to push forward, regardless of his feelings:

…he was determined henceforward to obey the hrossa or eldila. His efforts to rely on his own judgment in Malacandra had so far ended tragically enough. He made a strong resolution, defying in advance all changes of mood, that he would faithfully carry out the journey to Meldilorn if it could be done.

This resolution seemed to him all the more certainly right because he had the deepest misgivings about that journey.

…But all the time the old resolution, taken when he could still think, was driving him up the road.

C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet (Chapter 14)

This has echoes in Mere Christianity:

Now Faith, in the sense in which I am here using the word, is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods. For moods will change, whatever view your reason takes… That is why Faith is such a necessary virtue: unless you teach your moods “where they get off”…

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Book III, Chapter 11)

Ransom is aware that he’s heading into area populated by the thing he has feared most:

He understood that the harandra, which he had to cross, was the home of the sorns. In fact he was walking of his own free will into the very trap that he had been trying to avoid ever since his arrival on Malacandra…

C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet (Chapter 14)

However, he is determined to do what those he trusts have told him to do:

In any case he was determined henceforward to obey the hrossa or eldila…

…he felt remarkably well, though greatly chastened in mind.

C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet (Chapter 14)

As Ransom ascends to the heights, we were reminded of Orual’s ascent of the mountain where she heard the invitation:

“Why should your heart not dance?”

C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces (Part I, Chapter 9)

Andrew alluded to this quotation where Lewis talks about how virtue, such as obedience, brings light:

Virtue—even attempted virtue—brings light; indulgence brings
fog.

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Book III, Chapter 5)

Matt referred to a recent interview with Jonathan Roumie from The Chosen with Bishop Robert Barron:

Ransom’s fear about aliens resurface, and he theorises how a virtuous people may be ruled by super rational creatures who are, themselves, driven by a dark superstition:

Those old terrestrial fears of some alien, cold intelligence, superhuman in power, sub-human in cruelty…

…the hrossa were after all under the thumb of the sorns, superior to their masters in all the qualities that human beings value, but intellectually inferior to them and dependent on them. It would be a strange but not an inconceivable world; heroism and poetry at the bottom, cold scientific intellect above it, and overtopping all some dark superstition which scientific intellect, helpless against the revenge of the emotional depths it had ignored, had neither will nor power to remove. A mumbo-jumbo . . . 

C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet (Chapter 14)

2. “Going further up…”

Ransom thinks back to how he felt the first time he went into the unknown in Malacandra:

He looked back on that time as on a nightmare, on his own mood at that time as a sort of sickness. Then all had been whimpering, unanalysed, self-nourishing, self-consuming dismay. Now, in the clear light of an accepted duty, he felt fear indeed, but with it a sober sense of confidence in himself and in the world, and even an element of pleasure. It was the difference between a landsman in a sinking ship and a horseman on a bolting horse: either may be killed, but the horseman is an agent as well as a patient.

C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet (Chapter 14)

Matt saw the provision along the journey as paralleling Jesus’ words to His disciples:

“Do not get any gold or silver or copper to take with you in your belts— no bag for the journey or extra shirt or sandals or a staff, for the worker is worth his keep. Whatever town or village you enter, search there for some worthy person and stay at their house until you leave.

Matthew 10:9-11

David mentioned The Stairs of Cirith Ungol from The Lord of the Rings:

David compared Ransom’s journey to Lewis’ words about being amazed about what you can do when you really have to do it:

Not only in examinations but in war, in mountain climbing, in learning to skate, or swim, or ride a bicycle, even in fastening a stiff collar with cold fingers, people quite often do what seemed impossible before they did it. It is wonderful what you can do when you have to.

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Book III, Chapter 5)

Matt spoke about how Ransom’s attention meant that he didn’t miss the turning:

He began soon to be anxious about his road, for if he could make the top at all he could do it only by daylight, and the middle of the afternoon was approaching. But his fears were unnecessary. When it came it was unmistakable.

C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet (Chapter 14)

“Which of you, if your son asks for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a snake? If you, then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him!

Matthew 7:9-11

It was impossible to recall what he had felt about Hyoi, or Whin, or the eldila, or Oyarsa. It seemed fantastic to have thought he had duties to such hobgoblins—if they were not hallucinations—met in the wilds of space. He had nothing to do with them: he was a man. Why had Weston and Devine left him alone like this?

C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet (Chapter 14)

The light within was an unsteady one and a delicious wave of warmth smote on his face…. There were two things in it. One of them, dancing on the wall and roof, was the huge, angular shadow of a sorn: the other, crouched beneath it, was the sorn himself.

C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet (Chapter 14)

We saw in this an allusion to Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, which also is alluded to in The Silver Chair:

“Your sun is a dream; and there is nothing in that dream that was not copied from the lamp. The lamp is the real thing; the sun is but a tale, a children’s story.”

C.S. Lewis, The Silver Chair (Chapter 12)

Matt alluded to David’s interview with Andrew back in S3E18 about Till We Have Faces. However, it was the idea of Orual’s unveiling which Andrew promised to steal, not her unveiling.

3. “Hello, earthman!”

Even coming face-to-face with a Sorn, Ransom is steadfast in continuing his mission:

He had no idea what might be coming next, but he was determined to carry out his programme

C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet (Chapter 15)

The Sorn uses logic to deduce where Ransom is from:

‘You are small and thick and that is how the animals ought to be made in a heavier world. You cannot come from Glundandra, for it is so heavy that if any animals could live there they would be flat like plates—even you, Small One, would break if you stood up on that world. I do not think you are from Parelandra, for it must be very hot; if any came from there they would not live when they arrived here. So I conclude you are from Thulcandra.’

C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet (Chapter 15)

Here we have another planet mentioned, Glundandra, which is Jupiter. The planets in this book series is depicted on The Silent Planet Wiki:

Ransom encounters his first real piece of technology on Malacandra, some kind of respirator:

‘Smell on this,’ it said. ‘The hrossa also need it when they pass this way.’

Ransom inhaled and was instantly refreshed. His painful shortness of breath was eased and the tension of chest and temples was relaxed. The sorn and the lighted cavern, hitherto vague and dream-like to his eyes, took on a new reality.

‘Oxygen?’ he asked; but naturally the English word meant nothing to the sorn.

C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet (Chapter 15)

4. “Introductions”

We now get a description of the Sorn:

It was sitting on its long, wedge-shaped buttocks with its feet drawn close up to it. A man in the same posture would have rested his chin on his knees, but the sorn’s legs were too long for that. Its knees rose high above its shoulders on each side of its head—grotesquely suggestive of huge ears—and the head, down between them, rested its chin on the protruding breast. The creature seemed to have either a double chin or a beard; Ransom could not make out which in the firelight. It was mainly white or cream in colour and seemed to be clothed down to the ankles in some soft substance that reflected the light.

C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet (Chapter 15)

The Sorn is also described as a gawk.

Andrew refers to The Disordered Image which has the different covers of Lewis’ books.

5. “Séroni hospitality”

Ransom is initially comforted by the fact that the Séroni are shepherds, but he then remembers that the Cyclops in Greek Mythology was also a shepherd and he ate men…

For a moment Ransom found something reassuring in the thought that the sorns were shepherds. Then he remembered that the Cyclops in Homer plied the same trade.

C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet (Chapter 15)

Andrew referred to Luke Skywalker’s blue milk in A New Hope:

6. “Power dynamics”

Ransom wants to know who is in charge and in their discussion, Augray gives his view of the hrossa:

‘The hrossa know nothing except about poems and fish and making things grow out of the ground.’

C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet (Chapter 15)

We discover more about Oyarsa:

‘Oyarsa does not die,’ said the sorn. ‘And he does not breed. He is the one of his kind who was put into Malacandra to rule it when Malacandra was made. His body is not like ours, nor yours; it is hard to see and the light goes through it.’

…he is the greatest of eldila who ever come to a handra

C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet (Chapter 15)

In a discussion about eldila, David warned listeners not to try and map them too easily onto St. Gregory of the Great’s explanation of the Angels.

7. “What are eldila?”

David compared the eldila to the DC superhero, The Flash:

To us the eldil is a thin, half-real body that can go through walls and rocks: to himself he goes through them because he is solid and firm and they are like cloud.

C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet (Chapter 15)

Lewis compares the eldila to angel-like creatures in other religions:

It had dawned on him that the recurrent human tradition of bright, elusive people sometimes appearing on the Earth—albs, devas and the like—might after all have another explanation than the anthropologists had yet given.

C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet (Chapter 15)

David suggested that this was because Lewis was hiding his hand from less observant readings – comparing them to angels would have been too obvious.

8. “Fear & Fortitude”

Ransom sees earth:

He saw perfect blackness and, floating in the centre of it, seemingly an arm’s length away, a bright disk about the size of a half-crown.

… It was all there in that little disk—London, Athens, Jerusalem, Shakespeare. There everyone had lived and everything had happened; and there, presumably, his pack was still lying in the porch of an empty house near Sterk.

‘Yes,’ he said dully to the sorn. ‘That is my world.’ It was the bleakest moment in all his travels.

C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet (Chapter 15)

Ransom needs to nap! (HALT)

Wrap-Up

Question-of-the-week

Ransom is determined to get to Meldilorn. How do you keep your resolutions in the face of struggles? How do you tell your moods where to get off and train the habit of faith in spite of them?

Question-of-the-week

Question-of-the-week

Andrew has been talking with Laura Biron Scott, Rector of Lewis’ old church:

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