S8E4 – Perelandra (Chapter 3: “A Vision of Venus”)

We’re diving into the golden waters of “Perelandra”, chapter three. Ransom attempts to describe his arrival on the planet Venus to his astounded Thulcandran friends. Lewis begins to unveil his mastery of prose…

S8E4: Chapter Three – “A Vision of Venus” (Download)

Show Notes

Introduction

Quote-of-the-week

There was something in Perelandra that might overload a human brain.

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra

Chit-Chat

• There’s been a large gap in recording sessions. The last two were taped before Matt’s wedding, and the Undiscovered C. S. Lewis Conference in Portland. If you’d like to hear the juicy details, listen to our latest Common Room episode.
• Lots of traveling recently for David and his family. He and Marie recently became Godparents. The Portland conference was a blast! And he just returned from an annual company summit in Chicago, which might have turned him off of trains. Finally, the Bates family will be flying across the pond to visit family in Ireland and England for three weeks.
• Like David, Andrew has been living out of a suitcase recently. Along with the conference and wedding, he traveled to Knoxville, Tennessee to baptise a friend’s children, and he held an event for the C. S. Lewis Institute in Atlanta for a retreat. He’ll be holding another one soon. Andrew used his time to show off his collection of J. R. R. Tolkien poems, and first edition “Narnia” books. He shared his goal of posting a book per day to his eBay site.
• Matt has been joyfully embracing married life. At the time of recording, it is Mrs. Bush’s birthday. Happy birthday to Mary Margaret!

Toast

• Matt had a Celsius mixed drink.
• Andrew had his usual HEB San Antonio blend in his Chicago Starbucks mug.
• David cracked open a Best Day Brewing Hazy IPA. We’re still recording on Friday mornings, give us a break.

And today, we’re toasting Patreon supporter Elizabeth Schroeder…

Discussion

Chapter Summary

The chapter begins as Lewis shares the various hints offered by Ransom of his indescribable celestial state while travelling to Venus in a casket. 

Ransom arrives on Venus, splashing down in the seemingly endless ocean. He finds the casket has dissolved and himself swimming, rising up and rushing down the mountainous waves. 

After enduring a storm, he pulls himself up onto one of the floating islands where he rests and then tries to explore the ever-changing landscape. He discovers some delicious yellow fruit, but chooses to not take another. As darkness falls on Perelandra, Ransom falls into a deep sleep.

01. “Opening Thoughts”

• Spoiler alert: if you haven’t guessed it already, Perelandra is an un-fallen world.
• They spend some time praising Lewis’ flowing, beautiful and poetic prose. Perhaps some of the reason for this is the context. Lewis was reading through Milton’s “Paradise Lost” at the time, and Andrew pondered whether he was attempting to embody a Miltonian spirit.

02. “Travelling by Coffin (I)”

Q: Lewis begins this chapter by telling us that Ransom never specifically said what it was like to travel by a coffin from one planet to another, but that bits and pieces came out obliquely. Three examples are given. It’s not the simplest thing, so let’s look at them in turn…

• The scene seems to be set at an Inklings meeting. Ransom and friends are talking about traveling the world and “seeing life”. Then, one person in the group, “B” (100 percent Owen Barfield) talked about seeing life in a different sense.

On one occasion, someone had been talking about “seeing life” in the popular sense of knocking about the world and getting to know people, and B. who was present (and who is an Anthroposophist) said something I can’t quite remember about “seeing life” in a very different sense. I think he was referring to some system of meditation which claimed to make “the form of Life itself” visible to the inner eye.

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Three

• Ransom appears to have connected the “inner eye” concept to his experience travelling in the coffin.

He even went so far–under extreme pressure–as to say that life appeared to him, in that condition, as a “coloured shape.” Asked “what colour,” he gave a curious look and could only say “what colours! yes, what colours!” But then he spoiled it all by adding, “of course it wasn’t colour at all really. I mean, not what we’d call colour,” and shutting up completely for the rest of the evening.

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Three

• Matt pondered how an unfallen world would appear to our eyes. The reason these paragraphs were confusing is because we have never experienced such a state, and Lewis is attempting to communicate something that cannot precisely be put into words.
• In the “Companion to Narnia”, Paul Ford tells the reader to take note of the repeating phrases in Lewis’ works. One example is in “The Magician’s Nephew”:

“Do you realize what you’re saying? Think what Another World means – you might meet anything – anything.“

C. S. Lewis, Uncle Andrew, The Magician’s Nephew

• A similar phrase was repeated by Peter in “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe”, saying that the Professor would let the Pevensie siblings do “anything” they liked.
• David believes Ransom is experiencing a transcendental reality, watching life from outside of it. He compared it to Plato’s cave, leaving one’s own reality to experience true reality.
• In “Out of the Silent Planet”, the heavens were teeming with life, and were not empty and sterile.

03. “Travelling by Coffin (II)”

The second hint concerning Ransom’s experience of travelling by coffin came when a sceptical friend McPhee was arguing against the Resurrection of the Body…

“So you think you’re going to have guts and palate for ever in a world where there’ll be no eating, and genital organs in a world without copulation? Man, ye’ll have a grand time of it!” when Ransom suddenly burst out with great excitement, “Oh, don’t you see, you ass, that there’s a difference between a trans-sensuous life and a non-sensuous life?”

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Three

Ransom argues that the functions and appetites of the body would disappear, not because they were atrophied but because they were, as he said “engulfed” a searching for language to communicate this, speaking about “trans-sexual” in regards to copulation and “trans-gastronomic” in regards to food.

Q. How does this inform us about Ransom’s journey?

• In McPhee, we find a kind of Kirkpatrick, Lewis’ atheistic tutor in Belphast. McPHee also appears in “The Dark Tower”, “Out of the Silent Planet”, and the sequal to this book, “That Hideous Strength”.
• It appears that Ransom got to experience a life similar to that of the angels, not disembodied, but more fully embodied; although the comparison isn’t perfect. After all, angels aren’t corporeal.

04. “Travelling by Coffin (III)”

The final example Lewis gives regarding Ransom’s coffin life comes from a rare direct conversation about it with Ransom. Jack said:

“Of course I realise it’s all rather too vague for you to put into words,” when [Ransom] took me up rather sharply, for such a patient man, by saying, “On the contrary, it is words that are vague. The reason why the thing can’t be expressed is that it’s too definite for language.”

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Three

Q. What should we conclude from this?

• The Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Sussure talked about a difference between the signified and the signifier. The signified is the concept or thing that is being described, but the signifier is a word, image, or sound that attempts to describe it. One quickly notices how slippery language can be.
• Lewis is noticing here how Modernists are attempting to deconstruct language. He writes a poem towards the end of his life responding to this, called “Re-adjustment”.

For devils are unmaking language. We must let that alone forever.

C. S. Lewis, Re-adjustment

• This section reminded Matt of “The Great Divorce”, where new reality is so vivid and beyond what souls have experienced before. Unlike in “Out of the Silent Planet”, Ransom doesn’t appear to be concerned with threats nearly as much. He recognises that this is good, true, and beautiful. Additionally, like in “The Great Divorce”, “Perelandra” starts off grey and spooky and depleted, but erupts into colour and life.
• David mentioned Plato’s Theory of the Forms; the real realities are realer than the descriptions of them.
• Lewis ends by saying…

One thing is certain, that he came back from Venus even more changed than he had come back from Mars. But of course that may have been because of what happened to him after his landing…

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Three

• And then he goes on to talk about that landing…

05. “Splashdown”

Using language reminiscent of Lewis’ own conversion in “Surprised By Joy”, Ransom awakes “from his indescribable celestial state” as he nears Venus, experiencing the sensation of falling. One side of him is very warm and the other very cold. Intense white light from the planet begins to fill the coffin. The white light disappears and the temperature disparity between his left and right side evens out. The predominant colour appearing through the casket was coppery. He’s scared as he rapidly falls feet-first towards the planet like a lift or elevator falling down its shaft. Suddenly there’s a great green darkness, an unidentifiable noise, and a marked drop in temperature. Then he’s horizontal and somehow moving upwards and then he’s able to move his limbs as the casket seems to be melting!

Q. As in “Out of the Silent Planet”, we get all of this from Ransom’s confused point of view. What’s happened?

• The reader is as confused as Ransom himself is. What happens is that the casket plunges deep into the Perelandrian sea, and rises to the surface. The white light is the sunlight reflecting through the outer atmosphere, the “albedo”. The scene is reminiscent of a birth; the distress, strange light, water, the casket which bursts, melts, and sets him free all reflect this.
• Andrew played a recording of Lewis reading aloud part of Chapter 3, recorded in August, 1960. This is part of the “Lost C. S. Lewis Analog Tapes”, which can be purchased and downloaded from The Rabbit Room.
• Pay attention to the metallic colours in this chapter. Venus is filled with copper and a lush green (because of oxidation of copper).

06. “Surf’s Up!”

Ransom discovers himself swimming and in the midst of great ocean swells, rising and falling on the MASSIVE waves. 

There was a wave ahead of him now so high that it was dreadful. We speak idly in our own world of seas mountain high when they are not much more than mast high. But this was the real thing. If the huge shape had been a hill of land and not of water he might have spent a whole forenoon or longer walking the slope before he reached the summit. It gathered him into itself and hurled him up to that elevation in a matter of seconds. But before he reached the top, he almost cried out in terror. For this wave had not a smooth top like the others. A horrible crest appeared; jagged and billowy and fantastic shapes, unnatural, even unliquid, in appearance, sprouted from the ridge. Rocks? Foam? Beasts? The question hardly had time to flash through his mind before the thing was upon him.

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Three

Q. What do you make of this scene?

• Matt talked about the tumultuous sea being a common allegory for chaos and fear. But even then, the freshness of the world dimmed Ransom’s fear, even in the face of towering waves.
• David recalled the end of “The Voyage of the Dawn Treader”, and the gold in Narnia in comparison to the gold of Venus.

Very soon the open sea which they were leaving was only a thin rim of blue on the western horizon. Whiteness, shot with the faintest color of gold, spread round them on every side, except astern where their passage had thrust the lilies apart and left an open lane of water that shone like dark green glass.

C. S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, The Very End of the World

The sky was pure, flat gold like the background of a medieval picture.

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Three

• Additionally, the waters of both worlds were sweet, rather than salty.

But when the dripping Mouse had reached the deck it turned out not to be at all interested in the Sea People.
“Sweet!” he cheeped. “Sweet, sweet!”
“What are you talking about” asked Drinian crossly. “And you needn’t shake yourself all over me, either.”
“I tell you the water’s sweet,” said the Mouse. “Sweet, fresh. It isn’t salt.”
…The King took the bucket in both hands, raised it to his lips, sipped, then drank deeply and raised his head. His face was changed. Not only his eyes but everything about him seemed to be brighter.
“Yes,” he said, “it is sweet. That’s real water, that. I’m not sure that it isn’t going to kill me. But it is the death I would have chosen – if I’d known about it till now.”
“What do you mean?” asked Edmund.
“It – it’s like light more than anything else,” said Caspian.
“That is what it is,” said Reepicheep. “Drinkable light. We must be very near the end of the world now.”

C. S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, The Wonders of the Last Sea

As he rushed smoothly up the great convex hillside of the next wave he got a mouthful of the water. It was hardly at all flavoured with salt; it was drinkable–like fresh water and only, by an infinitesimal degree, less insipid. Though he had not been aware of thirst till now, his drink gave him a quite astonishing pleasure. It was almost like meeting Pleasure itself for the first time.

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Three

• As Andrew pointed out, thirst is an incredibly important theme, in subsequent Narnia books, and in “Till We Have Faces” with Orual. The sensual is an invitation to spiritual insight.

At the name of Aslan each one of the children felt something jump in its inside. Edmund felt a sensation of mysterious horror. Peter felt suddenly brave and adventurous. Susan felt as if some delicious smell or some delightful strain of music had just floated by her. And Lucy got the feeling you have when you wake up in the morning and realize that it is the beginning of the holidays or the beginning of summer.

C. S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe

• Speaking of the senses, Ransom also described feeding on the sights of Venus.

The water gleamed, the sky burned with gold, but all was rich and dim, and his eyes fed upon it undazzled and unaching.

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Three

• David loved Ransom’s sensual experience in this next passage:

He had somehow turned on his back. He saw the golden roof of that world quivering with a rapid variation of paler lights as a ceiling quivers at the reflected sunlight from the bath-water when you step into your bath on a summer morning.  He guessed that this was the reflection of the waves wherein he swam. It is a phenomenon observable three days out of five in the planet of love. The queen of those seas views herself continually in a celestial mirror.

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Three

• Lewis spends time talking about the Edenic pleasures in “The Four Loves” as well.
• As we leave this section, something unknown strikes Ransom in the face in the water. Perhaps a mat of weeds?

It behaved rather like a mat of weeds on a river–a mat of weeds that takes on every contour of the little ripples you make by rowing past it–but on a very different scale.

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Three

07. “Pleasures Forevermore”

Lewis then tells us that all the events so far,  this assault on Ransom’s senses, had only lasted five minutes. He’s not yet worried about survival as the water is refreshing, he’s not tired, and he trusts those eldilla who have sent him here. 

Q.  Lewis returns to the question of pleasure, speaking of “excessive pleasure which seemed somehow to be communicated to [Ransom] through all his senses at once.” What do you understand by this?

• Ransom responds to the world in much the same way that the children in the Narnian Chronicles respond to the Narnian air; they become vigorously youthful and confident. On top of this, he feels no fear or guilt.

[Ransom] was not in the least tired, and not yet seriously alarmed as to his power of surviving in such a world. He had confidence in those who had sent him there, and for the meantime the coolness of the water and the freedom of his limbs were still a novelty and a delight; but more than all these was something else at which I have already hinted and which can hardly be put into words – the strange sense of excessive pleasure which seemed somehow to be communicated to him through all his senses at once. I use the word “excessive” because Ransom himself could only describe it by saying that for his first few days on Perelandra he was haunted, not by a feeling of guilt, but by surprise that he had no such feeling.

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Three

• Andrew touched on the lack of guilt, connecting it to the scene in “The Last Battle”, where Edmund described the death of the Pevensie children. The absence of guilt is what should be present in an unfallen world.

There was a frightful roar and something hit me with a bang, but it didn’t hurt. And I felt not so much scared as – well, excited.

C. S. Lewis, The Last Battle, How the Dwarfs Refused to Be Taken In

• We usually feel guilty when we experience pleasures, because they are typically outside of social norms. However, God is not anti-pleasure: He created it, Experienced in its true and proper way, it is a very good thing. In “The Screwtape Letters”, the senior temptor describes God as a hedonist.

He’s a hedonist at heart. All those fasts and vigils and stakes and crosses are only a façade. Or only like foam on the seashore. Out at sea, out in His sea, there is pleasure, and more pleasure. He makes no secret of it… He has a bourgeois mind. He has filled His world full of pleasures.

C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

• This is actually a reference to scripture:

Thou dost show me the path of life;
    in thy presence there is fulness of joy,
    in thy right hand are pleasures for evermore.

Psalm 16:11

• In “Mere Christianity”, Lewis describes Christianity as the truly body-positive (in a sense) religion, because it celebrates creation and pleasures. The Incarnation redeems and elevates the human body, and validates the sensual experiences of it, because Christ took on flesh.

08. “Land Ahoy!”

Q. A storm then breaks out and “Another flash followed, and another, and then the storm was all about him. Enormous purple clouds came driving between him and the golden sky, and with no preliminary drops a rain such as he had never experienced began to fall. There were no lines in it; the water above him seemed only less continuous than the sea, and he found it difficult to breathe. The flashes were incessant.” It starts raining, not cats and dogs, but frogs! What on earth is going on here?

• According to Pliny the Younger, nothing on earth is going on. This is Venusian. And although certain weather conditions on earth can make it rain amphibians, it could also be that this is something Lewis dreamt up to make Perelandra different from Thulcandra.

Q. The storm eventually starts to calm down and he spies some more of the “floating stuff” which he saw earlier. What are they?

• Although the stuff appears to be vegetation, this is actually the “land”, or floating, malleable islands of Perelandra. As all of Lewis’ books began with a picture, this one began with this vision; floating islands, which demanded science fiction.

Q. The “islands” are sturdy enough to grab onto and climb up on. He lies exhausted for some time, when he starts looking around, what does he find?

• Valleys rapidly turn into ridges as the island floats over waves, taking their form.

Q. What happens when Ransom tries to walk?

• He keeps falling over due to the changing landscape under his feet:

A blessed relaxation of the strain in which he had been living since his arrival dissolved him into weak laughter. He rolled to and fro on the soft fragrant surface in a real schoolboy fit of the giggles.

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Three

• It’s even harder than learning to walk on a ship:

It was much harder than getting your sea-legs on a ship, for whatever the sea is doing the deck of the ship remains a plane.

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Three

• Like David mentioned before, landing on Perelandra was like being born. Well, after infancy comes toddlerhood, and learning to walk! David shared that his young daughter is learning to walk herself.

…he was proud when he could go five paces without a fall, arms outstretched, knees bent in readiness for sudden change of balance, his whole body swaying and tense like that of one who is learning to walk the tight-rope.

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Three

• Andrew quoted “The Screwtape Letters” again:

He wants them to learn to walk and must therefore take away His hand; and if only the will to walk is really there He is pleased even with their stumbles.

C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

• A similar idea is expressed by the spirit of MacDonald in “The Great Divorce”.
• Pleasure is mentioned again…

Perhaps he would have learned more quickly if his falls had not been so soft, if it had not been so pleasant, having fallen, to lie still and gaze at the golden roof and hear the endless soothing noise of the water and breathe in the curiously delightful smell of the herbage.

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Three

• So… we’ve gone from baby’s birth to a toddler’s walk… What’s the next task? Learning to feed oneself…

09. “Fruit of the Tree”

Ransom comes to a wooded part of the Island. The smells create a new kind of hunger and thirst in him. He discovers great globes of yellow fruit clustered like toy balloons. After accidentally puncturing one of them, he drinks the contents: “It was like the discovery of a totally new genus of pleasures, something unheard of among men, out of all reckoning, beyond all covenant. For one draught of this on earth wars would be fought and nations betrayed.”

Q. What’s happening to Ransom’s senses?!

• Matt talked about the theme of longing that runs through Lewis’ works. Truth, beauty and goodness are meant to point us towards God.

The smells in the forest were beyond all that he had ever conceived. To say that they made him feel hungry and thirsty would be misleading; almost, they created a new kind of hunger and thirst, a longing that seemed to flow over from the body into the soul and which was a heaven to feel.

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Three

Q. Why doesn’t he take a second fruit?

As he let the empty gourd fall from his hand and was about to pluck a second one, it came into his head that he was now neither hungry nor thirsty. And yet to repeat a pleasure so intense and almost so spiritual seemed an obvious thing to do. His reason, or what we commonly take to be reason in our own world, was all in favour of tasting this miracle again; the child-like innocence of fruit, the labours he had undergone, the uncertainty of the future, all seemed to commend the action. Yet something seemed opposed to this “reason.” It is difficult to suppose that this opposition came from desire, for what desire would turn from so much deliciousness? But for whatever cause, it appeared to him better not to taste again. Perhaps the experience had been so complete that repetition would be a vulgarity–like asking to hear the same symphony twice in a day.

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Three

• Andrew talked about living in the age of convenience, and the impact on the (much younger) generation.

But godliness with contentment is great gain.

1 Timothy 6:6

• Matt expounded upon this, explaining how truth is meant to shape us, not about us us shaping our reality to meet our own desires.
• This idea was discussed at length in “Out of the Silent Planet” in a dialogue about pleasure.

A pleasure is full grown only when it is remembered. You are speaking, Hman, as if the pleasure were one thing and the memory another. It is all one thing.

C. S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet

• In this scene in Perelandra, Lewis appears to be redeeming the mistake that caused the Fall; fruit as a way to good, not to evil.

10. “Sunset”

Q. Anything you want to say about the sunset?

• Matt shared some beautiful prose:

But the darkness was warm. Sweet new scents came stealing out of it. The world had no size now. Its boundaries were the length and breadth of his own body and the little patch of soft fragrance which made his hammock, swaying ever more and more gently. Night covered him like a blanket and kept all loneliness from him. Sleep came like a fruit which falls into the hand almost before you have touched the stem.

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Three

• Some other things of note; the “peacock” mentioned in the chapter is Hera, wife of Zeus. It is also Christological, with early Christian art using the peacock to refer to Christ.

The orb itself remained invisible, but on the rim of the sea rested an arc of green so luminous that he could not look at it, and beyond that, spreading almost to the zenith, a great fan of colour like a peacock’s tail.

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Three

• Lewis uses a modern analogy in this section earlier in the chapter as well. He uses these to calm the readers down and not overstimulate them.

He saw the golden roof of that world quivering with a rapid variation of paler lights as a ceiling quivers at the reflected sunlight from the bath-water when you step into your bath on a summer morning.

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Three

• David contradicted Andrew, saying that Lewis is following after his master, George MacDonald, and connecting his fantasy world with the real world, in order to re-enchant it.
• Andrew also connected the undulation of the islands to “Mere Christianity” and “The Screwtape Letters”:

To step out of the forest would have been a minute’s work on earth; on this undulating island it took him longer, and when he finally emerged into the open an extraordinary spectacle met his eyes.

C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Three

Wrap-Up

Concluding Thoughts

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