S8E21 – “The Great Dance”, After Hours with Junius Johnson

David chats with theologian Dr. Junius Johnson to discuss the theological significance of The Great Dance in “Perelandra”.

S8E21: “The Great Dance”, After Hours with Junius Johnson (Download)

Show Notes

Introduction

Quote of the Week

For the resemblance was, in its own fashion, infinite, so that almost you could wonder and finding no sorrows in his brow and no wounds in his hands and feet. Yet there was no danger of mistaking, not one moment of confusion, no least sally of the will towards forbidden reverence. Where likeness was greatest, mistake was least possible.

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Seventeen

Biographical Information

Dr. Johnson has been on this show before, back when we were discussing “The Dark Tower”, the abandoned sequel to “Out of the Silent Planet”. On his website, JuniusJohnson.com, he is described thus:

Dr. Junius Johnson is a Yale-trained scholar of theology, philosophy, and literature who devotes his time to thinking and writing about whatever is good, noble, and excellent, and how to bring these things to bear to nurture meaningful lives. He is a prolific writer, an engaging speaker, an inspiring teacher, and a passionate musician.

Chit-Chat

• Dr. Johnson talked about his upbringing with Lewis, beginning with being read “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe” in kindergarden, and continuing into his Christian teenage years with Lewis’ apologetic work.
• The first time Dr. Johnson read the Ransom trilogy was as a high school senior. He was taken in by the old-school sci-fi nature of the first book, and then found “Perelandra” to be extremely beautiful. “That Hideous Strength” had the greatest impact on him, and inspired him to become a writer. Dr. Johnson was awoken to the richness of “Perelandra” after teaching about it, and now believes it to be Lewis’ most theological novel.

Toast

• David drank his last Athletic Brewing Co. NA beer, “Round of Cheers”.
• Meanwhile, Dr. Johnson had a Masala chai tea.

Discussion

01. “Motivation”

Q. So why were you so passionate about coming onto the show to talk about the final chapter of “Perelandra”?

• This last chapter is one of the best contemplations of theology that Dr. Johnson has come across, and as a theologian, he wants to help others experience the beauty of it. He especially wants us to reflect on the effect of the fall, and just exactly what we lost because of it.

02. “Ransom’s Reaction”

Q. So, where would you like to begin?

• At the beginning of course! After Tor and Tinidril appear after completing their testing and have been confirmed in grace, Ransom fell before them.

There was great silence on the mountain top and Ransom also had fallen down before the human pair. When at last he raised his eyes from the four blessed feet, he found himself involuntarily speaking though his voice was broken and his eyes dimmed. “Do not move away, do not raise me up,” he said. “I have never before seen a man or a woman. I have lived all my life among shadows and broken images. Oh, my Father and my Mother, my Lord and my Lady, do not move, do not answer me yet. My own father and mother I have never seen. Take me for your son. We have been alone in my world for a great time.”

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Seventeen

• The scene reminds Dr. Johnson of the Transfiguration, because true heavenly brightness makes everything pale in comparison. The same is true for masculinity and femininity in this scene.

After six days Jesus took with him Peter, James and John the brother of James, and led them up a high mountain by themselves. There he was transfigured before them. His face shone like the sun, and his clothes became as white as the light.

Matthew 17:1-2

• This idea appears in “Out of the Silent Planet” and “The Last Battle” and “The Weight of Glory”, where the things of Heaven are so glorified that one is tempted to worship them.
• Dr. Johnson talked about the confirmation in grace of Tor and Tinidril, which has been given to the angels, and one day will be given to us; an inability to commit sin. We currently live in the inverse of this, which is an inability to avoid sin.
• They discuss the increase in freedom that comes with the inability to sin, referencing Chesterton’s fence from “Orthodoxy”.

We might fancy some children playing on the flat grassy top of some tall island in the sea. So long as there was a wall round the cliff’s edge they could fling themselves into every frantic game and make the place the noisiest of nurseries … But the walls were knocked down, leaving the naked peril of the precipice. They did not fall over; but when their friends returned to them they were all huddled in terror in the center of the island; and their song had ceased.

G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

• Dr. Johnson explains that the people of Perelandra are indeed human, but they are of a different tree entirely. We are of the race of Adam, while the future inhabitants of Perelandra will be of the race of Tor.

Q. Is Ransom’s reaction to Tor and Tinidril idolatrous in your view?

• Essentially, there is a difference between a dead and living image. The dead one is constrained by time, and the future events will not impact the past. Living portraits will morph according to how you are now, and has a deep relationship tie to the original. Tor is more fully himself the more he reflects Christ.
• David mentions a verse from Matthew, about how we are meant to see God in our fellow man.

“The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’”

Matthew 25:40

• As Lewis discusses in “The Four Loves”, idolatry is fixed by correcting disorder and loving the right things more.
• Dr. Johnson explained the “do not raise me up” phrase, which was a gesture from the noble glass that shows special favour and love. Ransom wants to fully experience where on the ladder he is placed.

03. “Meaning of Oyarsa”

Q. As we were planning this episode you said that you also were interested in how the meaning of “Oyarsa” shifts in this chapter…

• Originally, the term “Oyarsa” referred to something like an archangel. Here, it is a job description, a title that essentially means “steward”, with enormous ability, responsibility, and honour. This is what will happen in Heaven with the saints, according to scripture…

If any of you has a dispute with another, do you dare to take it before the ungodly for judgment instead of before the Lord’s people? Or do you not know that the Lord’s people will judge the world? And if you are to judge the world, are you not competent to judge trivial cases? Do you not know that we will judge angels? How much more the things of this life!

1 Corinthians 6:1-3

Jesus said to them, “Truly, I say to you, in the new world, when the Son of man shall sit on his glorious throne, you who have followed me will also sit on twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel.

Matthew 19:28

• David brought up an interesting question relating to Jesus’ power: was it in virtue of His own divinity, or was it, in His humanity, participating with the Holy Spirit as humans were originally meant for?
• Another intreaguing point is that when Perelandra hands down her crown to Tor and Tinidril, they are referred to as “Oyarsa Perelandri”, in the plural form, though they hold a singular title. This highlights the institution of marriage, and how two become one flesh, and create one image of humanity and of God.

04. “A Vision of Evil”

Q. You also wanted to talk about how we can see evil more clearly?

• Ransom is initially frightened to say the wrong thing and expose Tinidril to evil, tempting her. However, he learns that she has knowledge of evil now, but remains in the grace of Maleldil, where the Un-Man was tempting her to experience evil apart from Him.

“We know these things now,” said the King, seeing Ransom’s hesitation. “All this, all that happened in your world, Maleldil has put into our mind. We have learned of evil, though not as the Evil One wished us to learn. We have learned better than that, and know it more, for it is waking that understands sleep and not sleep that understands waking. There is an ignorance of evil that comes from being young: there is a darker ignorance that comes from doing it, as men by sleeping lose the knowledge of sleep. You are more ignorant of evil in Thulcandra now than in the days before your Lord and Lady began to do it. But Maleldil has brought us out of the one ignorance, and we have not entered the other. It was by the Evil One himself that he brought us out of the first. Little did that dark mind know the errand on which he really came to Perelandra!”

C. S. Lewis, King Tor, Perelandra, Chapter Seventeen

• Jack brings up a similar idea about knowledge of evil in “Mere Christianity”:

A silly idea is current that good people do not know what temptation means. This is an obvious lie. Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is…. That is why bad people, in one sense, know very little about badness. They have lived a sheltered life by always giving in. We never find out the strength of the evil impulse inside us until we try to fight it…

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

05. “Plans for Perelandra”

Q. You said you also wanted to talk about Tor’s plans for Perelandra…

• Tor says that Perelandra will orbit the sun 10,000 times, which would equate to 6,100 years on earth, due to our longer orbits. This is the traditional number from the beginning of Genesis to our current day.
• It is interesting, once again, to consider what our futures might have looked like had the fall not occurred.

Q. What then are we to make of the planet Malacandra, which still has an eldila as its Oyarsa?

• There are many reasons for this…

1. Malacandra is an old world, older than Thulcandra. Their history was ongoing before our own fall.
2. There are three rational species on Malacandra that were made to compliment one another rather than rule over each other.
3. But the biggest reason is that the Hnau, the rational species, have to take the form of human, since the Incarnation. The Oyarsa acts as king, priest, and prophet for the world they steward. And since the destiny of the saints is to judge the world, in subsequent worlds, human Hnau become Oyarsa.

06. “The Great Dance”

Q. In the time we’ve got left, let’s talk about the Great Dance itself.

• There is a poetic version of this by Ruth Pitter, which David has been reading from to examine The Great Dance.
• Dr. Johnson compares reading this section of the chapter to Dante in “Paradiso”, when he reaches the Trinity. His mind reels, and he is so fully immersed in bliss that he is swept up, and readers have trouble fully comprehending it.

…as a wheel turns smoothly, free from jars, my will and my desire were turned by love, The love that moves the sun and the other stars.

Dande Alighieri, Paradiso

• In this part of the chapter, it becomes completely unclear who is saying what. The rational beings who are present in this dance all become one instrument in praise. This is like the relationship of the three Persons of the Trinity, called “perichoresis”.
• This connectedness is a key feature in a dance, which requires a “flow”, looking towards each other and not towards themselves. David compared this particular dance to the Vienesse Walz.

• Dr. Johnson pointed to the end of the chapter, how eventually, the words seem to disappear, and become a visual reality for Ransom. Each time Ransom seems to declare one part more important, another became greater.

And now, by a transition which he did not notice, it seemed that what had begun as speech was turned into sight, or into something that can be remembered only as if it were seeing. He thought he saw the Great Dance. It seemed to be woven out of the intertwining undulation of many cords or bands of light, leaping over and under one another and mutually embraced in arabesques and flower-like subtleties. Each figure as he looked at it became the master-figure or focus of the whole spectacle, by means of which his eye disentangled all else and brought it into unity–only to be itself entangled when he looked to what he had taken for mere marginal decorations and found that there also the same hegemony was claimed, and the claim made good, yet the former pattern not thereby dispossessed but finding in its new subordination a significance greater than that which it had abdicated … And by now the thing must have passed altogether out of the region of sight as we understand it.

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Seventeen

• Each continued to elevate the others; though they were the greatest, they became the least, following after the greatest example, Christ himself.

Have this mind among yourselves, which was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

Philippians 2:5-11

Wrap Up

Concluding Thoughts

• Dr. Johnson recommended that listeners take each morning to meditate on a section of The Great Dance during the season of Lent.

More Information

• To find more of Dr. Johnson’s podcast appearances and work, visit his website. He has some C. S. Lewis courses that will be available this summer.
• He is also a co-host of The Classical Mind podcast with Fr. Wesley Walker, and contributes to their Substack.

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