S8E14 – Perelandra – Chapter 11: “Let’s Get Ready to Rumble!”

Ransom wrestles with his inner self as he tries to discern his next move.

S8E14: Chapter 11 – “Let’s Get Ready to Rumble!” (Download)

Show Notes

Introduction

Quote-of-the-Week

A stone may determine the course of a river. He was that stone at this horrible moment which had become the center of the whole universe.

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter 11

Chit-Chat

• This episode, we’re pleased to welcome a special guest on the podcast, a former host of the show, Matthew Bush! He’s back after a hiatus, on provisional terms of course.
• Matt explained that his absence was due to the chaotic holiday season and Notre Dame winning the playoffs.
• Andrew had a wonderful birthday staying with family at a cabin rental in Tennessee.
• David posted a TedX Talk on the blog on the fifth day of Christmas, sharing a “Noel” poem by J. R. R. Tolkien (5 golden rings, get it?). Check it out if you’re interested.

Current Reads

• Matt is reading “The Fourth Wing”, which he compares to “Red Rising”.
• Andrew has been reading “The Book of Common Prayer: A Biography” by Alan Jacobs.
• David has been going through “Why Literature Still Matters” by Jason Baxter, who will be on the show soon!

Toast

• Matt is having a Kölsch Style beer from Best Day Brewing Company.
• Andrew stuck with his coffee, due to abnormally frigid temperatures in Florida.
• David has moved on to Athletic Brewing, which he’s really been enjoying.
• Today, we are toasting new Patreon supporter, Mike Smith.

Discussion

Chapter Summary

Ransom realises that unless the temptations end, the Lady will eventually be worn down. He laments Maleldil’s apparent absence, but realises He has been present throughout and has sent Ransom as his representative.

There is an argument between Ransom, another voice in his head (his “voluble self”), and even the Darkness which seems to have a voice of its own. 

Ransom begins to consider whether he is meant to engage the Un-man in physical combat. 

He finally accepts his role in the salvation of Perelandra and Maleldil casts a deep sleep over all nearby and then sends Ransom to bed.

01. “Maleldil’s Parousia”

It’s after dark. The Un-man is waiting for Ransom to fall asleep so he can wake the Green Lady and talk to her without interference from Ransom. We’re told that  For the third time, more strongly than ever before, it came into [Ransom’s] head, “This can’t go on.” We’re told that “The Enemy was using Third Degree methods” which refers to techniques of interrogation or questioning that involve coercion, physical abuse, or psychological pressure.

Q. What does that mean and what’s Ransom’s chief fear?

• Ultimately, he believes that though he might take some ground one day, the next day he might lose it. Unlike himself, the Unman does not grow tired. Ransom believes that the Green Lady might accept the premise of the Unman, either out of exhaustion or due to being inundated with propaganda so much. He appears to be waiting in vain for a miracle to appear.

It seemed to Ransom that, but for a miracle, the Lady’s resistance was bound to be worn away in the end.

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Eleven

• He wonders why Maleldil has not appeared or sent someone to help, while the Enemy appears to have all the support in the world.

Why did no miracle come? Or rather, why no miracle on the right side? For the presence of the Enemy was in itself a kind of Miracle. Had Hell a prerogative to work wonders? Why did Heaven work none? Not for the first time he found himself questioning Divine Justice. He could not understand why Maleldil should remain absent when the Enemy was there in person.

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Eleven

Q. What happens to Ransom as he’s thinking these thoughts?

• He realises that Maleldil has been present…

But while he was thinking this, as suddenly and sharply as if the solid darkness about him had spoken with articulate voice, he knew that Maleldil was not absent. That sense–so very welcome yet never welcomed without the overcoming of a certain resistance–that sense of the Presence which he had once or twice before experienced on Perelandra, returned to him. The darkness was packed quite full. It seemed to press upon his trunk so that he could hardly use his lungs: it seemed to close in on his skull like a crown of intolerable weight so that for a space he could hardly think.

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Eleven

• …and has never been absent.

Moreover, he became aware in some indefinable fashion that it had never been absent, that only some unconscious activity of his own had succeeded in ignoring it for the past few days.

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Eleven

• The sentence about thick darkness reflects a verse from the Psalms:

The Lord reigns, let the earth be glad;
    let the distant shores rejoice.
Clouds and thick darkness surround him;
    righteousness and justice are the foundation of his throne.
Fire goes before him
    and consumes his foes on every side.

Psalm 97:1-3

02. “Here I Am, Send Me”

Q. The chattering part of Ransom’s brain complains in response to the recognition of Maleldil’s continued presence. We’re going to hear a lot from this chattering part of his brain in today’s chapter. It’s called his voluble critic or voluble self. Anyway, what does Ransom’s voluble critic say?

• The chattering part of his brain wants a more tangible presence to make an appearance.

“It’s all very well,” said this voluble critic, “a presence of that sort! But the Enemy is really here, really saying and doing things. Where is Maleldil’s representative?”

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Eleven

Q. An answer comes to Ransom. What is it and how does his voluble critic respond?

• Though it is not explicitly stated in the text, we can infer it. The answer is that Ransom is Maleldil’s representative.

The answer which came back to him, quick as a fencer’s or a tennis player’s riposte, out of the silence and the darkness, almost took his breath away. It seemed Blasphemous.

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Eleven

• His internal critic offers many complaints:

“Anyway, what can I do? …I’ve done all I can. I’ve talked till I’m sick of it. It’s no good, I tell you.” …The suggestion was, he argued, itself diabolical–a temptation to fatuous pride, to megalomania.

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Eleven

• There is a danger in thinking too highly or too much of ourselves. But Lewis talks in “The Weight of Glory” about seeing ourselves as we are, in the right light. We don’t want to fall into the sin of false humility after all, which could lead to passivity, and shifting the burdens onto others.
• Ransom is forced to really consider the gravity of his mission.

He was horrified when the darkness simply flung back this argument in his face, almost impatiently. And then–he wondered how it had escaped him till now–he was forced to perceive that his own coming to Perelandra was at least as much of a marvel as the Enemy’s. That miracle on the right side, which he had demanded, had in fact occurred. He himself was the miracle.

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Eleven

Q. Ransom regards himself as a pretty pathetic miracle, a ridiculously sun burnt man who is constantly defeated in argument. But he suddenly thinks of something which gives him comfort. What is it?

• In the end, what he can do is just his absolute best.

Very well then. He had been brought here miraculously… As long as he did his best… Maleldil would bring him safe back to earth after his very real, though unsuccessful, efforts. Probably Maleldil’s real intention was that he should publish to the human race the truths he had learned on the planet Venus. As for the fate of Venus, that could not really rest upon his shoulders.

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Eleven

• However, this isn’t given as an escape! Sean Connery in The Rock says the line “Losers are always whining about their best…”. Ransom receives the impression very clearly that, if he fails, Perelandra Falls. 

His journey to Perelandra was not a moral exercise, nor a sham fight. If the issue lay in Maleldil’s hands, Ransom and the Lady were those hands. The fate of a world really depended on how they behaved in the next few hours. The thing was irreducibly, nakedly real. They could, if they chose, decline to save the innocence of this new race, and if they declined its innocence would not be saved. It rested with no other creature in all time or all space. This he saw clearly, though as yet he had no inkling of what he could do.

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Eleven

• Andrew talked about the ancient Eastern Christian concept of Theosis, or participating in the divine life.
• Ransom’s inner voice continues to protest…

The imprudence, the unfairness, the absurdity of it! Did Maleldil want to lose worlds? What was the sense of so arranging things that anything really important should finally and absolutely depend on such a man of straw as himself?

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Eleven

• Ransom recalls the burden laid on those back on earth who are dying in World War II.

And at that moment, far away on Earth, as he now could not help remembering, men were at war, and white-faced subalterns and freckled corporals who had but lately begun to shave, stood in horrible gaps or crawled forward in deadly darkness, awaking, like him, to the preposterous truth that all really depended on their actions; and far away in time Horatius stood on the bridge, and Constantine settled in his mind whether he would or would not embrace the new religion, and Eve herself stood looking upon the forbidden fruit and the Heaven of Heavens waited for her decision. He writhed and ground his teeth, but could not help seeing.

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Eleven

Q. What final escape does he try?

• He realises that this is the only option presented to him, there is nothing else he can do.

Then came blessed relief. He suddenly realised that he did not know what he could do. He almost laughed with joy. All this horror had been premature. No definite task was before him. All that was being demanded of him was a general and preliminary resolution to oppose the Enemy in any mode which circumstances might show to be desirable: in fact–and he flew back to the comforting words as a child flies back to its mother’s arms–“to do his best”–or rather, to go on doing his best, for he had really been doing it all along. “What bug-bears we make of things unnecessarily!” he murmured, settling himself in a slightly more comfortable position. A mild flood of what appeared to him to be cheerful and rational piety rose and engulfed him.

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Eleven

03. “Mortal Kombat?”

Q. What thought does Ransom stumble into, which rocks his world?

• Because this is a spiritual struggle, he had at first thought that it should only be spiritual. However, it dawns on him that he might have go get into a physical altercation with the Unman. He thinks of it as “childish” and “savage”, but this is in part a disguise for his true fear of a fight with this creature. He remembers the frogs, after all…who could forget that nasty image?

Vivid pictures crowded upon him . . . the deadly cold of those hands (he had touched the creature accidentally some hours before) . . . the long metallic nails . . . ripping off narrow strips of flesh, pulling out tendons. One would die slowly. Up to the very end that cruel idiocy would smile into one’s face. One would give way long before one died–beg for mercy, promise it help, worship, anything.

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Eleven

Q. Why does he think this is obviously out of the question and what causes him to reconsider?

•  He thinks that “no such crude, materialistic struggle could possibly be what Maleldil really intended. Any suggestion to the contrary must be only his own morbid fancy. It would degrade the spiritual warfare to the condition of mere mythology.“
• Then, Ransom ponders the relationship between truth, myth, and fact.

Long since on Mars, and more strongly since he came to Perelandra, Ransom had been perceiving that the triple distinction of truth from myth and of both from fact was purely terrestrial–was part and parcel of that unhappy division between soul and body which resulted from the Fall. Even on earth the sacraments existed as a permanent reminder that the division was neither wholesome nor final. The Incarnation had been the beginning of its disappearance. In Perelandra it would have no meaning at all. Whatever happened here would be of such a nature that earth-men would call it mythological. All this he had thought before. Now he knew it. The Presence in the darkness, never before so formidable, was putting these truths into his hands, like terrible jewels.

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Eleven

• This passage made David think of Exorcisms. They are spiritual acts; however, they involve material and physical things, like oil, water, crucifixes, and words, in order to fight back against evil. This is because when a demon possesses someone, he subjects himself to the realities and pains of the material world.

04. “We’re Not In Eden Anymore…”

Q. How does his voluble self, his self resisting these thoughts, respond?

• It actually brings up a good argument. If the only way that the Lady can be kept in a state of innocence is through violence, would that prove that the truth is weaker than falsehood?

If the Lady were to be kept in obedience only by the forcible removal of the Tempter, what was the use of that? What would it prove? And if the temptation were not a proving or testing, why was it allowed to happen at all? Did Maleldil suggest that our own world might have been saved if the elephant had accidentally trodden on the serpent a moment before Eve was about to yield? Was it as easy and as un-moral as that? The thing was patently absurd!

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Eleven

• However, the “elephant” wouldn’t have a rational will in the same way that Ransom does. Ransom was very intentionally brought to the planet Perelandra. David compared it to sin, and how removing the temptation is often a successful way of avoiding wrongdoing, by not entering into a “near occasion of sin”. Matt chimed in with a discussion on successful habits; avoiding drinking or processed food is much easier if it is not in the house.

Q. As the voluble self peters out, what misconception does Ransom realise about how he’d been thinking about Eden and Perelandra?

• There aren’t perfect parallels due to the Incarnation, which changed everything, especially our relationship to God. Since Christ took on flesh, He saves and suffers, and now, we are His instruments, and he works through us, because we are a part of the Church.

Every minute it became clearer to him that the parallel he had tried to draw between Eden and Perelandra was crude and imperfect. What had happened on Earth, when Maleldil was born a man at Bethlehem, had altered the universe for ever. The new world of Perelandra was not a mere repetition of the old world Tellus. Maleldil never repeated Himself. As the Lady had said, the same wave never came twice. When Eve fell, God was not Man. He had not yet made men members of His body: since then He had, and through them henceforward He would save and suffer. One of the purposes for which He had done all this was to save Perelandra not through Himself but through Himself in Ransom. If Ransom refused, the plan, so far, miscarried.

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Eleven

• This applies to all of us in our everyday lives and our daily tasks. Ask yourself: when others look at you, are they seeing you, or Christ in you?
• Ransom ponders how long Eve was put under trial, because the text does not say. Moreover, how long would it take the Green Lady to break?

He did not know whether Eve had resisted at all, or if so, for how long. Still less did he know how the story would have ended if she had. If the “serpent” had been foiled, and returned the next day, and the next . . . what then? Would the trial have lasted for ever? How would Maleldil have stopped it?

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Eleven

• The Darkness offers him no answer to his questions about hypothetical alternative series of events in Genesis. Rather, it seems to want him to put his attention on the present moment.

Patiently and inexorably it brought him back to the here and the now, and to the growing certainty of what was here and now demanded…. Here in Perelandra the temptation would be stopped by Ransom, or it would not be stopped at all.

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Eleven

• This was reminiscent of Screwtape, who encourages his underling Wormwood to place his Patient’s gaze on anything but the here and now.

For the Present is the point at which time touches eternity.

C. S. Lewis, Screwtape, The Screwtape Letters

05. “The Last Line of Defence”

Q. Ransom is realising that he is going to have to fight the Unman. What last line of defence does his voluble self offer?

• He wonders if he would be able to actually kill it. For one, he is a scholar and not a soldier, and for another, he doesn’t know if the thing can really die.

Even if he were a fighting man–instead of a sedentary scholar with weak eyes and a baddish wound from the last war–what use was there in fighting it? It couldn’t be killed, could it?

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Eleven

• Ransom realises that Weston’s body, the thing’s tether to the world, could be destroyed. Without something else on the planet open and willing to accept it – evil always needs an open door – it would be kicked out, in a sense.

Weston’s body could be destroyed; and presumably that body was the Enemy’s only foothold in Perelandra. By that body, when that body still obeyed a human will, it had entered the new world: expelled from it, it would doubtless have no other habitation.

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Eleven

• He doubts that he’ll have the upper hand, however.

That he would be killed he felt certain. “When,” he asked, “did I ever win a fight in all my life?”

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Eleven

• Ransom tries to remind himself again that at that very moment, soldiers on Earth were sacrificing themselves for a lesser cause (WW2). However, he can’t shame himself into taking action. He thinks that with guns, he could beat the Unman. The idea of grappling with it is what troubles him. He fantasises about disobeying the Voice and repenting later, as St. Peter did. Then his mood changes, he thinks about possibly fighting and winning, even without any serious injury. However…

But no faintest hint of a guarantee in that direction came to him from the darkness. The future was black as the night itself.

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Eleven

06. “What’s In a Name?”

Q. Then the “Voice” in the darkness “says” something which takes things in a new direction. What does he say?

• Ransom was not given his name by mere coincidence!

“It is not for nothing that you are named Ransom,” said the Voice.

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Eleven

• We’re told the etymology of Ransom’s surname – Ranolf’s son – that’s how he knows he’s not making up this conversation in his head. He’s always thought of it as nothing more than a pun.

To connect the name Ransom with the act of ransoming would have been for him a mere pun…

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Eleven

• Ransom begins to see this as part of a greater plan. This teaches us that the whole is much more connected than we might think upon first look.

All in a moment of time he perceived that what was, to human philologists, a mere accidental resemblance of two sounds, was in truth no accident. The whole distinction between things accidental and things designed, like the distinction between fact and myth, was purely terrestrial… He knew now why the old philosophers had said that there is no such thing as chance or fortune beyond the Moon. Before his Mother had born him, before his ancestors had been called Ransoms, before ransom had been the name for a payment that delivers, before the world was made, all these things had so stood together in eternity that the very significance of the pattern at this point lay in their coming together in just this fashion. And he bowed his head and groaned and repined against his fate–to be still a man and yet to be forced up into the metaphysical world, to enact what philosophy only thinks.

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Eleven

• However, if we remember from “Out of the Silent Planet”, “Ransom” is actually a pseudonym given to him by Lewis. But it’s not for nothing that Lewis chose the name Ransom either. Maleldil’s hand was at work even when it came to the name Lewis chose for this character… or maybe it was just Lewis writing in haste and forgetting what he originally wrote. Most likely, it was God working through Lewis’ forgetfulness.

Q. Then the “Voice” then says something else. What is said and what’s its significance?

• The Voice also gives itself the name Ransom.

“My name also is Ransom,” said the Voice.

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Eleven

• This is a representation of one of the theories of the Atonement. Known as “ransom theory”, the claim goes that we are held hostage, and Christ comes to pay the ransom Himself.

For the Son of Man also came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.

Mark 10:45

You know that you were ransomed from the futile ways inherited from your fathers, not with perishable things such as silver or gold, but with the precious blood of Christ, like that of a lamb without blemish or spot.

1 Peter 1:18-19

…they sang a new song, saying, “Worthy art thou to take the scroll and to open its seals, for thou wast slain and by thy blood didst ransom men for God from every tribe and tongue and people and nation…”

Revelation 5:9

• This is significant because…

If he now failed, this world also would hereafter be redeemed. If he were not the ransom, Another would be. Yet nothing was ever repeated. Not a second crucifixion: perhaps–who knows–not even a second Incarnation … some act of even more appalling love, some glory of yet deeper humility.

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Eleven

• In other words, this is an opportunity for him to participate in the redemption process, before it is necessary for the inhabitants of Perelandra to be redeemed.

He had pictured himself, till now, standing before the Lord, like Peter. But it was worse. He sat before Him like Pilate. It lay with him to save or to spill. His hands had been reddened, as all men’s hands have been, in the slaying before the foundation of the world; now, if he chose, he could dip them again in the same blood. “Mercy,” he groaned; and then, “Lord, why me?” But there was no answer.

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Eleven

07. “The Decision is Made”

Q. Ransom then has an experience which had only previously happened to him once or twice – what is it?

• He feels an intense certainty that “the thing was going to be done.”

It had happened once while he was trying to make up his mind to do a very dangerous job in the last war. It had happened again while he was screwing his resolution to go and see a certain man in London and make to him an excessively embarrassing confession which justice demanded.

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Eleven

• Here, both freewill and predestination appear to come together, much as they do in “The Great Divorce”. Contrary to our typical beliefs about the two, they do not contradict one another, but are paradoxical to one another.

You might say, if you liked, that the power of choice had been simply set aside and an inflexible destiny substituted for it. On the other hand, you might say that he had been delivered from the rhetoric of his passions and had emerged into unassailable freedom. Ransom could not, for the life of him, see any difference between these two statements. Predestination and freedom were apparently identical. He could no longer see any meaning in the many arguments he had heard on this subject.

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Eleven

• As the character of George MacDonald says in “The Great Divorce”…

“Do not fash yourself with such questions. Ye cannot fully understand the relations of choice and Time till you are beyond both. And ye were not brought here to study such curiosities. What concerns you is the nature of the choice itself: and that ye can watch them making.”

C. S. Lewis, George MacDonald, The Great Divorce, Chapter Nine

• Ransom gains some perspective about his duty. This participatory approach takes the ego out of it, while offering a courageous, knightly sort of role.

He could hardly remember why he had accused himself of megalomania when the idea first occurred to him. It was true that if he left it undone, Maleldil Himself would do some greater thing instead. In that sense, he stood for Maleldil: but no more than Eve would have stood for Him by simply not eating the apple, or than any man stands for Him in doing any good action. As there was no comparison in person, so there was none in suffering–or only such comparison as may be between a man who burns his finger putting out a spark and a fireman who loses his life in fighting a conflagration because that spark was not put out. He asked no longer “Why me?” It might as well be he as another. It might as well be any other choice as this. The fierce light which he had seen resting on this moment of decision rested in reality on all.

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Eleven

• Andrew quoted Lewis’ poem “Re-adjustment”, describing it as Ransom’s dilemma; the key moment that contains all moments and all worlds.

Between the new Hominidae [apes] and us who are dying, already
There rises a barrier across which no voice can ever carry,
For devils are unmaking language. We must let that alone forever.
Uproot your loves, one by one, with care, from the future,
And trusting to no future, receive the massive thrust
And surge of the many-dimensional timeless rays converging
On this small, significant dew drop, the present that mirrors all.

C. S. Lewis, Re-adjustment

Wrap Up

Concluding Thoughts

Q: Maleldil then sends the Un-man into a deep sleep and tells Ransom to walk twenty paces into the wood and sleep, but before we all take a well-deserved nap, is there anything either of you would like to share?

• This chapter is great to start off the new year, particularly those making resolutions. All of us have a role to play in salvation history. Our job on earth is to take up the challenge set before us, and run the race to the best of our ability.

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