S8E12 – Perelandra – Chapter 9: “The Venusian Frog Massacre”

Ransom follows an unnerving and bloody trail to Weston, and upon doing so, discovers his quest. He then begins an intellectual battle of cosmic consequence.

S8E12: Chapter 9 – “The Venusian Frog Massacre” (Download)

Show Notes

Introduction

Quote-of-the-Week

“To walk out of His Will is to walk into nowhere.”

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra (Chapter 9)

Chit-Chat

• Andrew’s in-laws are hosting their 25th annual Christmas show, and then he’s off to Sarasota.
• David received a hilarious message from a listener, Summer, that her kids always insist on drinking out of the Pints with Jack glass. They bought them each glasses for Christmas so that she and her husband can get their glass back.
• David’s son Alexander was sick this week. As he was recovering, David used the time to bond with him, asking what he wanted to be what he grew up (a construction worker).

Toast

• We are continuing the Best Day Brewing streak this week. David and Andrew are having West Coast IPA, while Matt is drinking the Hazy IPA.
• Today, they are toasting new Patreon supporter Jody Gabrielson!

Discussion

Chapter Summary

Ransom follows a trail of mutilated frogs and discovers a possessed Weston. Ransom later finds him tempting The Lady to sleep on the Fixed Land, saying that Maleldil wants her to disobey His commands and in so doing grow wise! 

Ransom explains that only hardship came from Earth’s disobedience, but Weston points out that this resulted in something good – Maleldil’s Incarnation! When Ransom asks the thing possessing Weston what happened to him when Maleldil became a man, Weston howls like a dog.

The Lady goes to sleep, but throughout the night Weston torments Ransom by incessantly saying his name.

01. “A New Dawn, a New Day, a New Horror”

As usual, the chapter begins with Ransom waking up, and once again Perelandra showers him with the necessities of life. The land is good. He takes a walk by the sea on what’s described as a soft “carpet of saffron-coloured vegetation”, which even smells good! 

Q. He doesn’t see the Green Lady or Weston, but what does he see?

• Andrew points out the echo of “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe”, where Lewis describes Father Christmas’ coat as like the colour of holly berries. Likewise, Ransom uses the same descriptor.

He had waked a few minutes before and found himself lying alone in a close thicket of stems that were rather reed-like in character but stout as those of birch trees and which carried an almost flat roof of thick foliage. From this there hung fruits as smooth and bright and round as holly-berries, some of which he ate.

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Nine

• However, there is something much more disturbing that he discovers… one of the brightly coloured frogs has been injured, but in a very cruel and methodical way.

It was a damaged animal. It was, or had been, one of the brightly coloured frogs. But some accident had happened to it. The whole back had been ripped open in a sort of V-shaped gash, the point of the V being a little behind the head. Something had torn a widening wound backward–as we do in opening an envelope–along the trunk and pulled it out so far behind the animal that the hoppers or hind legs had been almost torn off with it. They were so damaged that the frog could not leap.

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Nine

• Ransom is horrified at the sight, especially in such an Edenic place. As it was with his first lie, the whole planet appears to recoil against it.

On earth it would have been merely a nasty sight, but up to this moment Ransom had as yet seen nothing dead or spoiled in Perelandra, and it was like a blow in the face. It was like the first spasm of well-remembered pain warning a man who had thought he was cured that his family have deceived him and he is dying after all. It was like the first lie from the mouth of a friend on whose truth one was willing to stake a thousand pounds. It was irrevocable… It was not merely pity for pain that had suddenly changed the rhythm of his heart-beats. The thing was an intolerable obscenity which afflicted him with shame. It would have been better, or so he thought at that moment, for the whole universe never to have existed than for this one thing to have happened.

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Nine

• Seeing the pain that the creature was in, he decides to euthanise it. But when he does, the situation gets even worse! It’s the first unnatural death on Perelandra.

Then he decided, in spite of his theoretical belief that it was an organism too low for much pain, that it had better be killed. He had neither boots nor stone nor stick. The frog proved remarkably hard to kill. When it was far too late to desist he saw clearly that he had been a fool to make the attempt. Whatever its sufferings might be he had certainly increased and not diminished them. But he had to go through with it. The job seemed to take nearly an hour. And when at last the mangled result was quite still and he went down to the water’s edge to wash, he was sick and shaken.

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Nine

• Perhaps the reason why the frog is so difficult to kill is because life on Perelandra is so much more potent, being an unfallen world.
• The scene reminded David of “Me, Myself, and Irene”, where Jim Carey’s character tries to kill a cow.

02. “The Trail to the Unman”

Q. Ransom continues his walk. What does he see next?

• He comes across another injured frog. And another…

At last he got up and resumed his walk. Next moment he started and looked at the ground again. He quickened his pace, and then once more stopped and looked. He stood stock-still and covered his face. He called aloud upon heaven to break the nightmare or to let him understand what was happening. A trail of mutilated frogs lay along the edge of the island.

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Nine

• Ransom follows the horrific trail of frogs, until he sees something that stops him dead in his tracks. It’s Weston – or whatever is animating Weston – and he’s tearing apart another frog.

Picking his footsteps with care, he followed it. He counted ten, fifteen, twenty: and the twenty-first brought him to a place where the wood came down to the water’s edge. He went into the wood and came out on the other side. There he stopped dead and stared. Weston, still clothed but without his pith helmet, was standing about thirty feet away: and as Ransom watched he was tearing a frog–quietly and almost surgically inserting his forefinger, with its long sharp nail, under the skin behind the creature’s head and ripping it open.

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Nine

• While Weston’s destruction of the frogs is methodical, it’s also disinterested. He seems to just want to spoil things for the sake of it.

Then he finished the operation, threw the bleeding ruin away, and looked up.

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Nine

• It’s like Alfred in “The Dark Knight” when he says:

• If you prefer a biblical reference instead, in John 10:10 (a line that will be referenced again later), Jesus says:

“The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.”

John 10:10

Q. How does Ransom react to Weston?

• He is dumbfounded, and says nothing. Weston is easily recognisable, and he is certainly not injured of otherwise physically ill. But the aura or sensation that he gives off is dead, almost corpse-like.

The terror was that he was also unrecognisable. He did not look like a sick man: but he looked very like a dead one. The face which he raised from torturing the frog had that terrible power which the face of a corpse sometimes has of simply rebuffing every conceivable human attitude one can adopt towards it. The expressionless mouth, the unwinking stare of the eyes, something heavy and inorganic in the very folds of the cheek, said clearly: “I have features as you have, but there is nothing in common between you and me.”

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Nine

• Matt connected this scene to “The Great Divorce”, and souls completely gone.
• Ransom comes to the alarming conclusion that Weston is gone, and from this point onward, begins referring to him in impersonal terms.

And now, forcing its way up into consciousness, thrusting aside every mental habit and every longing not to believe, came the conviction that this, in fact, was not a man: that Weston’s body was kept, walking and undecaying, in Perelandra by some wholly different kind of life, and that Weston himself was gone.

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Nine

• It reminded Andrew of “The Men in Black” when the alien puts on the man’s body.

• The next portion of the interaction is very creepy. The Thing smiles silently at him for a long period of time.

It looked at Ransom in silence and at last began to smile. We have all often spoken–Ransom himself had often spoken–of a devilish smile. Now he realised that he had never taken the words seriously. The smile was not bitter, nor raging, nor, in an ordinary sense, sinister; it was not even mocking. It seemed to summon Ransom, with a horrible naïveté of welcome, into the world of its own pleasures, as if all men were at one in those pleasures, as if they were the most natural thing in the world and no dispute could ever have occurred about them. It was not furtive, nor ashamed, it had nothing of the conspirator in it. It did not defy goodness, it ignored it to the point of annihilation. Ransom perceived that he had never before seen anything but half-hearted and uneasy attempts at evil. This creature was whole-hearted.

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Nine

• Ransom stumbles towards it, falls, and appears to pass out.

The stillness and the smiling lasted for perhaps two whole minutes: certainly not less. Then Ransom made to take a step towards the thing, with no very clear notion of what he would do when he reached it. He stumbled and fell. He had a curious difficulty in getting to his feet again, and when he got to them he overbalanced and fell for the second time. Then there was a moment of darkness filled with a noise of roaring express trains. After that the golden sky and coloured waves returned and he knew he was alone and recovering from a faint.

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Nine

• He wakes up alone, and ponders what he just saw. One of the torments of Hell would be to see the devils.

As he lay there, still unable and perhaps unwilling to rise, it came into his mind that in certain old philosophers and poets he had read that the mere sight of the devils was one of the greatest among the torments of Hell. It had seemed to him till now merely a quaint fancy. And yet (as he now saw) even the children know better: no child would have any difficulty in understanding that there might be a face the mere beholding of which was final calamity. The children, the poets, and the philosophers were right. As there is one Face above all worlds merely to see which is irrevocable joy, so at the bottom of all worlds that face is waiting whose sight alone is the misery from which none who beholds it can recover. And though there seemed to be, and indeed were, a thousand roads by which a man could walk through the world, there was not a single one which did not lead sooner or later either to the Beatific or the Miserific Vision. He himself had, of course, seen only a mask or faint adumbration of it; even so, he was not quite sure that he would live.

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Nine

• In “The Fulfilment of All Desire”, one of the saints was presented with a vision of Hell. It was beyond her comprehension.
• During this time, Lewis is also writing “A Preface to Paradise Lost”, with one of his criticisms of the book being that the Devil seems too interesting. He is also writing about the nature of evil in “The Screwtape Letters”, and his broadcast talks which will become “Mere Christianity”. He is spending a great deal of time considering evil.

03. “Searching for the Thing”

Q: What does Ransom do next?

• He gets up and begins to search for It.

When he was able, he got up and set out to search for the thing. He must either try to prevent it from meeting the Lady or at least be present when they met. What he could do, he did not know; but it was clear beyond all evasion that this was what he had been sent for. Weston’s body, travelling in a space-ship, had been the bridge by which something else had invaded Perelandra–whether that supreme and original evil whom in Mars they call The Bent One, or one of his lesser followers, made no difference.

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Nine

• Despite realising this horrible reality, he’s clear-minded and able to act.

Ransom was all goose-flesh, and his knees kept getting in each other’s way. It surprised him that he could experience so extreme a terror and yet be walking and thinking–as men in war or sickness are surprised to find how much can be borne.

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Nine

• After several hours, he spots two figures, and after another half hour, he comes up to “Weston” and the Lady. She appears transfixed in her conversation with It, so Ransom sits down beside her.

After several hours (for his progress was very slow) he suddenly saw two human figures on what was for the moment a skyline. Next moment they were out of sight as the country heaved up between them and him. It took about half an hour to reach them. Weston’s body was standing–swaying and balancing itself to meet each change of the ground in a manner of which the real Weston would have been incapable. It was talking to the Lady. And what surprised Ransom most was that she continued to listen to it without turning to welcome him or even to comment on his arrival when he came and sat down beside her on the soft turf.

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Nine

04. “The Great Branching Out”

Q. So, what is Weston arguing?

• He’s back to tempting the Lady to imagine what might be, referring to living on the Fixed Land. One has to wonder if this was what the temptation of Eve in our world was like.

“It is a great branching out,” it was saying. “This making of story or poetry about things that might be but are not. If you shrink back from it, are you not drawing back from the fruit that is offered you?”

C. S. Lewis, The Unman, Perelandra, Chapter Nine

• The Lady cleverly responds:

“It is not from the making a story that I shrink back, O Stranger,” she answered, “but from this one story that you have put into my head. I can make myself stories about my children or the King. I can make it that the fish fly and the land beasts swim. But if I try to make the story about living on the Fixed Island I do not know how to make it about Maleldil. For if I make it that He has changed His command, that will not go. And if I make it that we are living there against His command, that is like making the sky all black and the water so that we cannot drink it and the air so that we cannot breathe it.”

C. S. Lewis, The Green Lady, Perelandra, Chapter Nine

• In other words, she does not take issue with imagination, but specifically distorted imagination. She doesn’t know what to do with God in this supposal.
• She also questions the goodness in considering these things.

 “But also, I do not see what is the pleasure of trying to make these things.”

C. S. Lewis, The Green Lady, Perelandra, Chapter Nine

• It assures her that this will make her wise, like the women of Thulcandra.

“To make you wiser, older,” said Weston’s body.
“Do you know for certain that it will do that?” she asked.
“Yes, for certain,” it replied. “That is how the women of my world have become so great and so beautiful.”

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Nine

• There are echos of Genesis and the promises of the Serpent as to what will happen.

05. “Ransom’s Interruption”

Ransom interjects and pleads with the lady not to listen to Weston and to send him away. She seems pleased to see him, but he notes “the hint of something precarious” in her face.

Q. How does the queen react to this interruption?

• She’s surprised that Ransom would interrupt Weston before he’s finished. After all, she’s not used to group discussions! Though Maleldil speaks to her, it appears He has never interrupted. She’s also curious as to how the process works on earth.

“Why do you start speaking before this man has finished, Piebald?” she inquired. “How do they do in your world where you are many and more than two must often be together? Do they not talk in turns; or have you an art to understand even when all speak together? I am not old enough for that.”

C. S. Lewis, The Green Lady, Perelandra, Chapter Nine

Q. How does Ransom explain his interruption?

• He tells her that he doesn’t want her to listen to him, but can’t yet explain the reason why, not knowing if she will understand the concept of the words “evil” or “bad”.

“I do not want you to hear him at all,” said Ransom. “He is—-” and then he hesitated. “Bad,” “liar,” “enemy,” none of these words would, as yet, have any meaning for her.

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Nine

• He decides that he is going to build upon his earlier conversation with her about Satan, but by the time he thinks of this rebuttal, it’s too late.

Racking his brains he thought of their previous conversation about the great eldil who had held on to the old good and refused the new one. Yes; that would be her only approach to the idea of badness. He was just about to speak but it was too late. Weston’s voice anticipated him.

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Nine

06. “Poisoning the Well”

Q. How does Weston take advantage of Ransom’s pause?

• It accuses Ransom of resisting wisdom and progress, and wanting to keep the Lady “young”.

“This Piebald,” it said, “does not want you to hear me, because he wants to keep you young. He does not want you to go on to the new fruits that you have never tasted before.”

C. S. Lewis, The Unman, Perelandra, Chapter Nine

• It also accuses Ransom of Satan’s sin, where he is originally described as “the great eldil who had held on to the old good and refused the new one.”
• “Weston” points back to Ransom’s conversation with the Lady about the Hrossa, Seroni, and Pfiffletriggi.

“He did not know that all was new since Maleldil became a man and that now all creatures with reason will be men. You had to teach him this. And when he had learned it he did not welcome it.”

C. S. Lewis, The Unman, Perelandra, Chapter Nine

• What’s the important thing to know about that conversation? Weston was not there when it happened. Supernatural knowledge of things the person could not have known is a sign of demonic possession.
• Weston’s body also points out that Ransom would not teach her about death.

“And when you asked him to teach you Death, he would not. He wanted you to remain young, not to learn Death. Was it not he who first put into your mind the very thought that it was possible not to desire the wave that Maleldil was rolling towards us; to shrink so much that you would cut off your arms and legs to prevent it coming?”

C. S. Lewis, The Unman, Perelandra, Chapter Nine

• It says that Ransom is bad.

“One who rejects the fruit he is given for the sake of the fruit he expected or the fruit he found last time.”

C. S. Lewis, The Unman, Perelandra, Chapter Nine

• The Lady asks if Weston will teach her death. It says It will, and describes it in poetic and appealing terms. He also calls upon her courage.

“And will you teach us Death?” said the Lady to Weston’s shape, where it stood above her.
“Yes,” it said, “it is for this that I came here, that you may have Death in abundance. But you must be very courageous.“
“Courageous. What is that?”
“It is what makes you to swim on a day when the waves are so great and swift that something inside you bids you to stay on land.”
“I know. And those are the best days of all for swimming.”
“Yes. But to find Death, and with Death the real oldness and the strong beauty and the uttermost branching out, you must plunge into things greater than waves.“

C. S. Lewis, The Unman, Perelandra, Chapter Nine

• Note the inversion of John 10:10:

“The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.”

John 10:10

• G. K. Chesterton in “The Everlasting Man”, discusses this in further detail regarding the Albigensian heresy, or Catharism.
• The Lady begs Weston to go on, but It says it must wait until she is older.

“Go on. Your words are like no other words that I have ever heard. They are like the bubble breaking on the tree. They make me think of–of–I do not know what they make me think of.”
“I will speak greater words than these; but I must wait till you are older.”

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Nine

• Again an inversion of scripture; only He is speaking in terms of the Holy Spirit:

“I have yet many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth; for he will not speak on his own authority, but whatever he hears he will speak, and he will declare to you the things that are to come.”

Jesus, John 16:12-13

• The Lady and Ransom are speaking to an Anti Christ.
• Lewis speaks in “Mere Christianity” of the loss of a hill leading to the loss in the greater war. Andrew referenced “The Screwtape Letters”, where Screwtape warns of the danger of men continuing in their faith despite the loss of novelty and feeling.

Do not be deceived, Wormwood. Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do our Enemy’s will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.

C. S. Lewis, Screwtape, The Screwtape Letters

• In Genesis, the Serpent made it out as though God was holding out on Adam and Eve when He told them to not eat the fruit, lest they die.

07. “A Desire to Disobey”

In response to the Lady’s request for Weston to make her older, Ransom suggests that it would be better to let Maleldil make her older in His own time and way. Weston never looks at Ransom, but points back to another earlier conversation Ransom had with the Queen where Ransom said that Maleldil was beginning to let her walk by herself. He suggests that this was even the reason she and the King were separated, so that she could learn from Weston and make herself older. 

Q. How does Weston approach the question of disobedience?

• She knows that when you know what Maleldil wants yet wait for His voice, that in and of itself is a kind of disobedience. She compares it to a game of chase she plays with the animals, where she wants the animals to “disobey”.

“Before now I have chased a beast for mirth. And it has understood and run away from me. If it had stood still and let me catch it, that would have been a sort of obeying–but not the best sort.”

C. S. Lewis, The Green Lady, Perelandra, Chapter Nine

• Weston questions her certainty that Maleldil always wants her obedience. She wonders how love works in this sense.

“Are you certain that He really wishes to be always obeyed?”
“How can we not obey what we love?”

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Nine

• It points back to the animal game. The Lady ponders, then responds.

“I wonder,” said the Lady, “if that is the same. The beast knows very well when I mean it to run away and when I want it to come to me. But Maleldil has never said to us that any word or work of His was a jest. How could our Beloved need to jest or frolic as we do? He is all a burning joy and a strength. It is like thinking that He needed sleep or food.”

C. S. Lewis, The Green Lady, Perelandra, Chapter Nine

• Weston suggests that the commandment given by Maleldil might be put in place in order for her to break it, as a test of obedience.

“How could one seem to disobey?”
“By doing what He only seemed to forbid. There might be a commanding which He wished you to break.”

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Nine

• The Lady points out a problem with Weston’s epistomology:

“But if He told us we were to break it, then it would be no command. And if He did not, how should we know?”

C. S. Lewis, The Green Lady, Perelandra, Chapter Nine

• Weston suggests that Maleldil secretly wants her to disobey, because in order for her to truly “branch out”, the command needs to appear real. It wonders if it is possible for her to ever be fully grown until she appears to disobey. It says this while showering her with compliments.

“How wise you are growing, beautiful one,” said Weston’s mouth. “No. If He told you to break what He commanded, it would be no true command, as you have seen. For you are right, He makes no jests. A real disobeying, a real branching out, this is what He secretly longs for: secretly, because to tell you would spoil all.”

C. S. Lewis, The Unman, Perelandra, Chapter Nine

• The truth about It’s statements is that true love requires the ability to chose to not love anymore, but going on anyway. How can she grow on her own if she doesn’t have the potential to walk away?
• This statement appears to be too much for the Queen, and she ends the conversation.

“I begin to wonder,” said the Lady after a pause, “whether you are so much older than I. Surely what you are saying is like fruit with no taste! How can I step out of His will save into something that cannot be wished? Shall I start trying not to love Him–or the King–or the beasts? It would be like trying to walk on water or swim through islands. Shall I try not to sleep or to drink or to laugh? I thought your words had a meaning. But now it seems they have none. To walk out of His will is to walk into nowhere.“

C. S. Lewis, The Green Lady, Perelandra, Chapter Nine

• One thing that the Lady retains is a deep sense of trust in Maleldil. Andrew quoted “Mere Christianity”:

God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

He Himself is the fuel our spirits were designed to burn, or the food our spirits were designed to feed on.

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

• The first command that Aslan gives to Narnians upon their waking in “The Magician’s Nephew” is to love. It is the opposite of love that the spirit animating Weston is teasing along.

“Narnia, Narnia, Narnia, awake. Love. Think. Speak. Be walking trees. Be talking beasts. Be divine waters.”

C. S. Lewis, Aslan, The Magician’s Nephew

08. “The One Command to Break”

Q. How does Weston try to convince the Lady that Maleldil secretly wants the Lady to break the command not to sleep on the Fixed Island?

• It points out the obvious good nature of these commandments – “to love, to sleep, to fill this world with your children” – but notes that these is nothing apparently inherently good about this commandment. It seems random and contradictory, especially when compared to Thulcandra.

“These other commands of His–to love, to sleep, to fill this world with your children–you see for yourself that they are good. And they are the same in all worlds. But the command against living on the Fixed Island is not so. You have already learned that He gave no such command to my world. And you cannot see where the goodness of it is. No wonder. If it were really good, must He not have commanded it to all worlds alike? For how could Maleldil not command what was good? There is no good in it.”

C. S. Lewis, The Unman, Perelandra, Chapter Nine

• It says that Maleldil is forbidding just for forbidding’s sake.

“Maleldil Himself is showing you that, this moment, through your own reason. It is mere command. It is forbidding for the mere sake of forbidding.”

C. S. Lewis, The Unman, Perelandra, Chapter Nine

• The Lady asks why He would do this, and It claims that it is a test.

“But why . . . ?”
“In order that you may break it. What other reason can there be?…  Is not Maleldil showing you as plainly as He can that it was set up as a test–as a great wave you have to go over, that you may become really old, really separate from Him.”

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Nine

• Again, Weston reiterates that Maleldil cannot tell her anything about the test by necessity.

“But if this concerns me so deeply, why does He put none of this into my mind? It is all coming from you, Stranger. There is no whisper, even, of the Voice saying Yes to your words.”
“But do you not see that there cannot be? He longs–oh, how greatly He longs–to see His creature become fully itself, to stand up in its own reason and its own courage even against Him. But how can He tell it to do this? That would spoil all.

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Nine

09. “Ransom’s Rebuttal”

Q. How does Ransom rebut Weston’s claims?

• He suggests an alternative explanation for the uniqueness of the rule about sleeping on the Fixed land. We can see the goodness in the other commandments, so we follow them because we want to. But what if we don’t want to? Shouldn’t there still be obedience to God out of love?

“I think [Maleldil] made one law of that kind in order that there might be obedience. In all these other matters what you call obeying Him is but doing what seems good in your own eyes also. Is love content with that? You do them, indeed, because they are His will, but not only because they are His will. Where can you taste the joy of obeying unless He bids you do something for which His bidding is the only reason? When we spoke last you said that if you told the beasts to walk on their heads, they would delight to do so. So I know that you understand well what I am saying.”

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

• Thi might be like Lewis’ experience with atheists in the Socratic clubs at school.
• The Lady rejoices at her new understanding.

“Oh, brave Piebald,” said the Green Lady, “this is the best you have said yet. This makes me older far: yet it does not feel like the oldness this other is giving me. Oh, how well I see it! We cannot walk out of Maleldil’s will: but He has given us a way to walk out of our will. And there could be no such way except a command like this. Out of our own will.”

C. S. Lewis, The Green Lady, Perelandra, Chapter Nine

• The Lady also understands that the wisdom she is learning from Ransom is different in kind than that of the adversary.

10. “The Old Devil”

Q. Ransom says he’s not young like Weston says. How does Weston respond?

• He responds badly.

The voice of Weston’s face spoke suddenly, and it was louder and deeper than before and less like Weston’s voice. “I am older than he,” it said, “and he dare not deny it. Before the mothers of the mothers of his mother were conceived, I was already older than he could reckon. I have been with Maleldil in Deep Heaven where he never came and heard the eternal councils. And in the order of creation I am greater than he, and before me he is of no account.”

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Nine

• In the face of this blow, Ransom feels inclined to lie. But he doesn’t, because…

 In that air, even when truth seemed fatal, only truth would serve.

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Nine

• In the end, he simply says:

“In our world to be older is not always to be wiser.”

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

11. “This Has Been Tried Before…”

Q. Ransom then turns to the history of earth as his defence. What does he say?

• He says that Weston’s plan has been tried before and didn’t go well…

“The thing he wants you to try has been tried before. Long ago, when our world began, there was only one man and one woman in it, as you and the King are in this. And there once before he stood, as he stands now, talking to the woman. He had found her alone [false] as he has found you alone. And she listened, and did the thing Maleldil had forbidden her to do. But no joy and splendour came of it. What came of it I cannot tell you because you have no image of it in your mind. But all love was troubled and made cold, and Maleldil’s voice became hard to hear so that wisdom grew little among them; and the woman was against the man and the mother against the child; and when they looked to eat there was no fruit on their trees, and hunting for food took all their time, so that their life became narrower, not wider.“

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

12. “Fortunate Fall”

Q. How does Weston respond to Ransom’s explanation of what happened following the fall?

• He says that something good came out of the Fall, describing the greatness and technological prowess of mankind, in a statement reminiscent of Weston on Malacandra. In addition, he claims that sacrifice is only possible with death.

“Hardness came out of it but also splendour. They made with their own hands mountains higher than your Fixed Island. They made for themselves Floating Islands greater than yours which they could move at will through the ocean faster than any bird can fly. Because there was not always food enough, a woman could give the only fruit to her child or her husband and eat death instead–could give them all, as you in your little narrow life of playing and kissing and riding fishes have never done, nor shall do till you break the commandment. Because knowledge was harder to find, those few who found it became more beautiful and excelled their fellows as you excel the beasts; and thousands were striving for their love . . .”

C. S. Lewis, The Unman, Perelandra, Chapter Nine

• Moreover, It even uses the gospels as an argument, describing the Felix peccatum Adae, or the “happy fault of Adam” that resulted in the Incarnation of Christ.

“He has not told you that it was this breaking of the commandment which brought Maleldil to our world and because of which He was made man. He dare not deny it.”

C. S. Lewis, The Unman, Perelandra, Chapter Nine

Q. Does Ransom try to deny it?

• No; of course good came of it, but that does not make the action good.

“Of course good came of it. Is Maleldil a beast that we can stop His path, or a leaf that we can twist His shape? Whatever you do, He will make good of it. But not the good He had prepared for you if you had obeyed Him. That is lost for ever.”

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

• Andrew talked about a friend of his who wants to marry, but is settling in the meantime in his relationship that he knows will go nowhere. Andrew suggested that he let go in order sacrifice, and to make room for his future wife. David said it reminded him of a quote from the movie “Shopgirl”:

“So, I can hurt now, or hurt later.”

Steve Martin, Shopgirl

• Turning the tables, Ransom then asked Weston what happened to him because of the Incarnation.

“What good came to you? Do you rejoice that Maleldil became a man? Tell her of your joys, and of what profit you had when you made Maleldil and death acquainted.”

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

• Weston howls like a dog, and the Lady falls asleep!

In the moment that followed this speech two things happened that were utterly unlike terrestrial experience. The body that had been Weston’s threw up its head and opened its mouth and gave a long melancholy howl like a dog; and the Lady lay down, wholly unconcerned, and closed her eyes and was instantly asleep.

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Nine

• It’s like an echo of the Psalms:

In peace I will lie down and sleep, for you alone, Lord, make me dwell in safety.

Psalm 4:8

• The howling refers to the theory of atonement, also known as… the Ransom Theory!
• Matt asks why the spirit animating Weston would want to cause a second Fall if the first one ended so poorly for him. David explained that, like Weston injuring the frogs for pleasure at the beginning of the chapter, the Devil just wants to destroy because he enjoys destruction. Though he knows he can’t win, he wants to take as many as he can with him. Andrew added that evil isn’t logical, it isn’t supposed to make sense.
• There is a self delusion about the enemy, as Andrew points out in the five “I am” statements in Isaiah.

How you have fallen from heaven,
    morning star, son of the dawn!
You have been cast down to the earth,
    you who once laid low the nations!
You said in your heart,
    “I will ascend to the heavens;
I will raise my throne
    above the stars of God;
I will sit enthroned on the mount of assembly,
    on the utmost heights of Mount Zaphon.
I will ascend above the tops of the clouds;
    I will make myself like the Most High.”
But you are brought down to the realm of the dead,
    to the depths of the pit.

Isaiah 14:12-15

• As Lewis says in “The Screwtape Letters”…

There is wishful thinking in Hell as well as on Earth.

C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, Preface

• Ransom watches Weston’s body move unnaturally, giving him the name that we’ll use to refer to the spirit animating Weston from now on.

Ransom had the sense of watching an imitation of living motions which had been very well studied and was technically correct: but somehow it lacked the master touch. And he was chilled with an inarticulate, night-nursery horror of the thing he had to deal with–the managed corpse, the bogey, the Un-man.

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Nine

13. “Ransom?”

Q. How does the chapter end?

• With the Un-man repeatedly saying Ransom’s name, only to say “Nothing” when he gets a response. It’s complete and utter pettiness for having lost this round.

…indefatigable nagging as of a nasty little boy at a preparatory school. Indeed no imagined horror could have surpassed the sense which grew within him as the slow hours passed, that this creature was, by all human standards, inside out–its heart on the surface and its shallowness at the heart. On the surface, great designs and an antagonism to Heaven which involved the fate of worlds: but deep within, when every veil had been pierced, was there, after all, nothing but a black puerility, an aimless empty spitefulness content to sate itself with the tiniest cruelties, as love does not disdain the smallest kindness?

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Nine

• In “Dr. Faustus” by Christopher Marlow, the main character is given all the power in the world, and uses it to play stupid jokes on people and gratify himself.
• Ransom asks It what It wants, to which it responds:

“What the Hell do you want?” he roared at last.
“Nothing,” said the voice.

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Nine

• Screwtape points this out in his letters.

And Nothing is very strong: strong enough to steal away a man’s best years not in sweet sins but in a dreary flickering of the mind over it knows not what and knows not why, in the gratification of curiosities so feeble that the man is only half aware of them, in drumming of fingers and kicking of heels, in whistling tunes that he does not like, or in the long, dim labyrinth of reveries that have not even lust or ambition to give them a relish, but which, once chance association has started them, the creature is too weak and fuddled to shake off.

C. S. Lewis, Screwtape, The Screwtape Letters

Wrap Up

Concluding Thoughts

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