We complete the conversation between Ransom and the Green Lady.
S8E7: Chapter Five – “An Interview With a Lady (Part II)” (Download)
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Show Notes
Introduction
Quote of the Week
The world is so much larger than I thought. I thought we went along paths – but it seems there are no paths. The going itself is the path.
C. S. Lewis, The Green Lady Perelandra, Chapter Five
Chit-Chat
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Toast
- After refreshing his drink, David now has a Stella Artois.
- Andrew had (cold) coffee, left over from the last episode.
Discussion
01. “Evening and Morning, The Third Day”
Q. Well, another day, another peculiar wake-up! What’s happening the next morning?
- Ransom woke up with a dragon snoozing on his feet and a yellow wallaby meandering by his head. The animals nudge him to get up, then shepherd him to go to the Green Lady, who is standing motionless (though not disengaged). She might be praying here.
- Ransom considers the Lady:
There was no category in the terrestrial mind which would fit her. Opposites met in her and were fused in a fashion for which we have no images. One way of putting it would be to say that neither our sacred nor our profane art could make her portrait. Beautiful, naked, shameless, young–she was obviously a goddess: but then the face, the face so calm that it escaped insipidity by the very concentration of its mildness, the face that was like the sudden coldness and stillness of a church when we enter it from a hot street–that made her a Madonna. The alert, inner silence which looked out from those eyes overawed him; yet at any moment she might laugh like a child, or run like Artemis or dance like a Mænad.
C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Five
- Before the fall, labor looked quite different. This woman doesn’t have to do anything; simply existing is beatific.
- Artemis is the Greek goddess of the moon and the hunt, but she is also the goddess of beasts. Notice the animals at her beck and call. At her word, the dragon and wallaby walk away into the woods.
- Echoing “Mere Christianity” and “The Four Loves”, there is a condescension in the Lady’s love of the animals, which somehow made them less inferior. It’s also reminiscent of Sarah Smith in “The Great Divorce”, who was surrounded by her attendants.
02. “It’s All Relative”
Ransom tells the Lady that he has been sent by Maleldil and asks her if she knows why. She does not.
Q. Ransom then asks about others on this planet. What does he discover?
- He learns that, on the entire planet, there are only two people. One is the Green Lady herself. The other is the King, her husband, and the father of her future children. She is waiting for his return, as they were separated by a particularly large wave.
- Ransom is very confused by their whole exchange, going through a similar state that Merlin will go through in “That Hideous Strength”. The Lady doesn’t know the meaning of very conventional words like “home” and “alone”.
- There’s an echo of the Magnificat (Mary’s song) in this passage:
“I do not understand,” he said.
“Nor I,” answered the Lady. “Only my spirit praises Maleldil who comes down from Deep Heaven into this lowness and will make me to be blessed by all the times that are rolling towards us. It is He who is strong and makes me strong and fills empty worlds with good creatures.”
C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Five
My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord,
Luke 1:46-55, “The Magnificat”
my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,
for he has looked with favor on his lowly servant.
From this day all generations will call me blessed:
the Almighty has done great things for me,
and holy is his Name.
He has mercy on those who fear him
in every generation.
He has shown the strength of his arm,
he has scattered the proud in their conceit.
He has cast down the mighty from their thrones,
and has lifted up the lowly.
He has filled the hungry with good things,
and the rich he has sent away empty.
He has come to the help of his servant Israel
for he has remembered his promise of mercy,
the promise he made to our fathers,
to Abraham and his children forever.
Glory to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit,
as it was in the beginning, is now, and will be forever. Amen.
Q. The Green Lady then says “Greet your Lady and Mother well from me when you return to your own world”. To whom is she referring? What does Ransom notice about her behaviour now, and how does he answer?
- She is either referring to Mary, or to Eve, the first mother. Upon realising that Ransom is not a king, and not her equal, she changes her tone.
She was a queen sending a message to a queen through a commoner, and her manner to him was henceforward more gracious.
C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Five
03. “What is death?”
Q. In response to the Green Lady’s request to “Greet your Lady and Mother well from me when you return to your own world”, Ransom explains that she’s dead and Green Lady asks what that is. How does Ransom explain death to her and how does she react to his explanation?
“What is dead?”
C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Five
“With us they go away after a time. Maleldil takes the soul out of them and puts it somewhere else–in Deep Heaven, we hope. They call it death.”
- In response, the Green Lady tells him to not be surprised at the unique role of earth. Not only do we look out onto the heavens (unlike the experience on Perelandra), but Maleldil takes everyone there when then die. She wonders whether Ransom was sent to Perelandra to teach them about about death.
- Ransom reacts badly to this, wanting instead to communicate the horror of death, in a scene that echos the death of Lazarus:
“It is not like that. It is horrible. It has a foul smell. Maleldil Himself wept when He saw it.”
C. S. Lewis, Ransom, Perelandra, Chapter Five
When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who had come along with her also weeping, he was deeply moved in spirit and troubled. “Where have you laid him?” he asked.
John 11: 33-39
“Come and see, Lord,” they replied.
Jesus wept.
Then the Jews said, “See how he loved him!”
But some of them said, “Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying?”
Jesus, once more deeply moved, came to the tomb. It was a cave with a stone laid across the entrance. “Take away the stone,” he said.
“But, Lord,” said Martha, the sister of the dead man, “by this time there is a bad odour, for he has been there four days.”
- She’s never seen this kind of facial expression. She’s bewildered by when “without effort, the ocean of her peace swallowed it up as if it had never been.” Ransom begins to understand her innocence.
Q. In an attempt to explain the horrible nature of death, Ransom explains that in our world not all events are pleasing or welcome, that there are some things you would do anything to stop and yet it happens. How does the Lady respond?
- With the brutal line:
“But how can one wish any of those waves not to reach us which Maleldil is rolling towards us?”
C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Five
He said, “Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return there; the Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.”
Job 1:21
- Death played a prominent role in “Out of the Silent Planet”, because it was a dying planet, whereas Perelandra is in its infancy.
04. “The great disappointment”
- In response, Ransom tries to explain that not all events are welcome, and finds that she can’t handle this revelation; her purity and innocence can be easily broken.
Against his better judgement Ransom found himself goaded into argument.
C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Five
“But even you,” he said, “when you first saw me, I know now you were expecting and hoping that I was the King. When you found I was not, your face changed. Was that event not unwelcome? Did you not wish it to be otherwise?”
“Oh,” said the Lady. She turned aside with her head bowed and her hands clasped in an intensity of thought. She looked up and said, “You make me grow older more quickly than I can bear,” and walked a little farther off. Ransom wondered what he had done. It was suddenly borne in upon him that her purity and peace were not, as they had seemed, things settled and inevitable like the purity and peace of an animal–that they were alive and therefore breakable, a balance maintained by a mind and therefore, at least in theory, able to be lost.
- He is terrified of the precarious nature of tall this, but “when she looked at him again he changed that word to Adventure, and then all words died out of his mind”. What does this scene tell us about where this story could be heading?
- Ransom reflects on “what what the old painters were trying to represent when they invented the halo”.
- When she responds, she’s rather enigmatic.
“I have been so young till this moment that all my life now seems to have been a kind of sleep. I have thought that I was being carried, and behold, I was walking.”
C. S. Lewis, The Green Lady, Perelandra, Chapter Five
05. “Unexpected Fruit”
- She goes on to talk about realising something obvious which had never occurred to her before. She describes going into the forest to pick food with a particular fruit in mind, but finding another. The Lady is starting to wrestle with free choice, and is not very comfortable with it.
“One joy was expected and another is given… the very moment of the finding there is in the mind a kind of thrusting back, or setting aside. The picture of the fruit you have not found is still, for a moment, before you. And if you wished–if it were possible to wish–you could keep it there. You could send your soul after the good you had expected, instead of turning it to the good you had got. You could refuse the real good; you could make the real fruit taste insipid by thinking of the other.“
C. S. Lewis, The Green Lady, Perelandra, Chapter Five
- In this section, Lewis is trying to show that comparison truly is the thief of joy. We can kill our own happiness by wanting something else. Matt talked about comparison robbing us of moments we could have thrived, while we were waiting for our own desires to come true, such as those around us finding and marrying their spouse, while we remain single. Andrew added that choosing someone is intentional and continuous, especially as people change with time.
06. “I See”
- The Lady accepts her choosing the will of Maleldil.
And this, O Piebald, is the glory and wonder you have made me see; that it is I, I myself, who turn from the good expected to the given good. Out of my own heart I do it. One can conceive a heart which did not: which clung to the good it had first thought of and turned the good which was given it into no good.”
C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Five
“I thought,” she said, “that I was carried in the will of Him I love, but now I see that I walk with it. I thought that the good things He sent me drew me into them as the waves lift the islands; but now I see that it is I who plunge into them with my own legs and arms, as when we go swimming. I feel as if I were living in that roofless world of yours where men walk undefended beneath naked heaven. It is a delight with terror in it! One’s own self to be walking from one good to another, walking beside Him as Himself may walk, not even holding hands. How has He made me so separate from Himself? How did it enter His mind to conceive such a thing? The world is so much larger than I thought. I thought we went along paths–but it seems there are no paths. The going itself is the path.”
07. “Happy without the King”
Q. Ransom asks her whether she’s afraid that it’ll be hard to turn her heart from the thing that she wanted to the thing given by Maleldil. After all, doesn’t she want the King?
- Ransom’s response is very telling…
“Want him?” she said. “How could there be anything I did not want?”
C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Five
“You can’t want him very much if you are happy without him,” he said: and was immediately surprised at the sulkiness of his own voice.
- Of course, Andrew immediately jumped in: this is “Till We Have Faces”, Orual sulking because Psyche is speaking of her husband, and not her. In other words, how can she be happy with something that Orual cannot share in?
- There are other things that can bring pleasure outside of specific people. Hobbies and relaxing are two examples. And all of it, including love for others, has to be downstream of love for the Holy Trinity. But that doesn’t mean we can’t have those other loves.
08. “The First Sin”
- She asks why, noting his frowning face and shrugging shoulders. Ransom lies, saying they mean nothing, but this has an odd effect on him, making him want to vomit, so he adjusted his speech to say that they mean nothing he could explain to her. He’s committed what is probably the first sin in this world.
- “The Magician’s Nephew”, Lewis’ other Venusian book, also speaks of evil being brought to a new world.
- The lady then tells him they’ve spoken enough for now, but stays where she is. Like a courtier before a queen, Ransom steps back a pace or two and then makes his way back into the forest.
“We have talked enough now,” she said at last. At first he thought she was going to turn away and leave him. Then, when she did not move, he bowed and drew back a step or two. She still said nothing and seemed to have forgotten about him. He turned and retraced his way through the deep vegetation until they were out of sight of each other. The audience was at an end.
C. S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter Five
Wrap Up
Concluding Thoughts
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