C. S. Lewis

by Roger Lancelyn Green

  And to another correspondent, Sister Penelope of the Community of St Mary the Virgin,* he wrote on 9 August 1939:

  The danger of ‘Westonism’ I meant to be real. What set me about writing the book was the discovery that a pupil of mine took all that dream of interplanetary colonization quite seriously, and the realization that thousands of people in one way and another depend on some hope of perpetuating and improving the human race for the whole meaning of the universe – that a ‘scientific’ hope of defeating death is a real rival to Christianity … You will be both grieved and amused to hear that out of about 60 reviews only 2 showed any knowledge that my idea of the fall of the Bent One was anything but an invention of my own! … any amount of theology can now be smuggled into people’s minds under cover of romance without their knowing it.12

  ‘I like the whole interplanetary idea as a mythology,’ Lewis had said, ‘and simply wished to conquer for my own (Christian) point of view what has always hitherto been used by the opposite side.’ What did he mean by myth and mythology? In the chapter on ‘Conversion’ it will be remembered that Lewis described Christianity as ‘a true myth’. Now, in Out of the Silent Planet, he intended to create his own. But as it was a work of fiction, a ‘thriller’, in what sense was it myth? The word is so variously used that we must find out what he meant by it.

  When Jack told Arthur Greeves in 1916 that ‘All religions, that is all mythologies’ – pagan and Christian – ‘are merely man’s own invention’ (see Chapter 1) he meant that ‘myth’ was another name for a lie. By the time, however, that Lewis, Tolkien and Hugo Dyson concluded their momentous talk about myth on the evening of Lewis’s conversion, he recognized two kinds of myth, pagan and Christian. Many pagan myths which he had once thought beautiful but untrue were now seen to be, as he said in The Pilgrim’s Regress, ‘pictures’ that contained the ‘divine call’. And Christianity, as Tolkien and Dyson helped him to see, was the story of myth becoming fact. Nowhere is this made clearer than in a valuable footnote Lewis added to Chapter 15 of Miracles:

  Just as, on the factual side, a long preparation culminates in God’s becoming incarnate as Man, so, on the documentary side, the truth first appears in mythical form and then by a long process of condensing or focusing finally becomes incarnate as History. This involves the belief that Myth in general is … a real though unfocused gleam of divine truth falling on human imagination. The Hebrews, like other people, had mythology: but as they were the chosen people so their mythology was the chosen mythology – the mythology chosen by God to be the vehicle of the earliest sacred truths, the first step in that process which ends in the New Testament where truth has become completely historical.13

  In his essay ‘Is Theology Poetry?’ Lewis emphasizes that the difference between pagan and Christian mythology is not a difference between falsehood and truth. ‘It is the difference between a real event on the one hand and dim dreams or premonitions of that same event on the other. It is like watching something come gradually into focus.’14

  As ‘The Silent Planet Myth’ is neither pagan myth nor true myth, in what sense is it myth? In the chapter ‘On Myth’ in Experiment in Criticism, Lewis gives a third definition that incorporates some of the qualities of both pagan and Christian mythology. Here he defines myth as ‘a particular kind of story which has a value in itself – a value independent of its embodiment in any literary work’:

  It is true that such a story can hardly reach us except in words. But … if some perfected art of mime or silent film or serial pictures could make it clear with no words at all, it would still affect us in the same way … Human sympathy is at a minimum. We do not project ourselves at all strongly into the characters. They are like shapes moving in another world. We feel indeed that the pattern of their movements has a profound relevance to our own life … The experience may be sad or joyful but it is always grave … The experience is not only grave but awe-inspiring … It is as if something of great moment had been communicated to us.15

  There is no firm evidence that Lewis read The Development of Christian Doctrine (1845) by the leader of an earlier ‘Oxford Movement’, John Henry Newman. However, Lewis praises many of Newman’s works, and the two certainly had much in common. In his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine Newman points out that, although the truths of the Gospel are ‘communicated to the world once for all by inspired teachers’, those truths are not ‘comprehended all at once by the recipients’ and that ‘longer time and deeper thought’ are necessary for their ‘full comprehension and development’.16 He means by this that the Apostles received the fullness of revealed knowledge, such as the historical fact of original sin. However, a full and accurate understanding of the doctrine of Adam’s fall was not completed until the time of Augustine and Pelagius in the fourth century. This is an instance of a doctrine ‘held implicitly’ at the beginning of the Church, then ‘asserting itself’ and becoming ‘fully developed’.17 If St Augustine’s treatment is a true ‘development’ of the faith revealed ‘once for all’ to the Apostles, then it follows that if St Augustine had been able to ask the Apostles about it, they would have said, ‘Yes, this is what we meant.’

  Lewis is perhaps unique in applying a similar ‘development’ to his science fiction. Most of those who write interplanetary stories pay little or no attention to the world they leave behind when they venture into outer space. Some have imagined planets with a different morality, or no morality, and even a different creator, from that of the Earth. Lewis clearly had something like Newman’s theory of ‘development’ in mind when he created the first of his ‘Supposals’ about the Silent Planet Myth and the Chronicles of Narnia.

  Suppose there are planets that contain creatures other than man? Suppose they are, unlike us, unfallen? In his essay ‘The Seeing Eye’ Lewis considers what would happen if Man visited other worlds and found other species of rational creatures:

  I observe how the white man has hitherto treated the black, and how, even among civilized men, the stronger have treated the weaker. If we encounter in the depth of space a race, however innocent and amiable, which is technologically weaker than ourselves, I do not doubt that the same revolting story will be repeated … It was in part these reflections that first moved me to make my own small contributions to science fiction.18

  Instead of making his science fiction stand totally independent of this world, he makes it an imaginary ‘development’ of what has already happened here. It is not inconceivable that if he had shown the Apostles Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra and asked, ‘Is this what you meant?’ they would have said ‘Yes.’

  Tolkien would certainly have agreed that what Lewis was doing in his science fiction was a good illustration of Newman’s theory of ‘development’: when recommending Out of the Silent Planet to his publisher on 4 March 1938, he said: ‘The myth is of course that of the Fall of the Angels (and the fall of man on this our silent planet); and the central point is the sculpture of the planets revealing the erasure of the sign of the Angel of this world.’19 Tolkien was referring to that great passage in the Revelation of St John the Divine which says:

  War arose in heaven, Michael and his angels fighting against the dragon; and the dragon and his angels fought, but they were defeated and there was no longer any place for them in heaven. And the great dragon was thrown down, that ancient serpent, who is called the Devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world – he was thrown down to the earth, and his angels were thrown down with him.20

  Lewis’s titanic imagination was let loose and he saw how this ‘war in heaven’ could become a setting for his interplanetary novels and a ‘development’ of the Revelation we already have. He combined the biblical account of the Fall of Satan with that medieval cosmography he knew so well. According to the medievals, as we move from the Heavens inward towards the Earth, we come to the Moon. With the Moon we cross the ‘great frontier’ from aether to air, from ‘heaven’ to ‘nature’, from the realm of gods (or angels) to
that of daemons, from the realm of necessity to that of contingency, from the incorruptible to the corruptible. This ‘great divide’ has hitherto not affected the angels, but on being thrown out of Heaven, Satan is confined to Earth, the Moon acting as the frontier to the ‘quarantine area’ beyond which he is not allowed to venture. Thereafter the Earth is known as Thulcandra – the ‘silent planet’ – because it is cut off from the heavens and the other planets.

  In Out of the Silent Planet Lewis’s hero, Dr Elwin Ransom, a philologist of Cambridge University, is kidnapped by two men, Dick Devine and Dr Weston, a mad physicist who wants to extend the reach of humanity to other planets. They force him aboard their spaceship and fly to the planet Malacandra (Mars) where they hope to find gold.

  During the voyage Ransom discovers that he has been brought along as a sacrifice to creatures called sorns. On arrival on this beautiful planet some sorns are spotted and, terrified, Ransom escapes his captors. In hiding, he is befriended by one of the other species of creatures on Malacandra – the hrossa. From Hyoi, a hross, whose body is similar to that of a seal or an otter, Ransom learns Old Solar, the language spoken before the Fall of Man. He is delighted with the simple agricultural life of the hrossa and their love of poetry, and he discovers that there are two other rational species on Malacandra: along with the sorns or séroni, tall, lean creatures like elongated men, who are devoted to scientific research, there are the pfifltriggi, frog-like creatures who work as miners and artisans.

  The Malacandrians are not fallen, and Ransom discovers that the closest word in Old Solar for ‘evil’ is ‘bent’. When the hrossa learn that Ransom’s ‘bent companions’ are trying to kill him he is ordered to go to Oyarsa, who lives at Meldilorn. They are surprised when he asks if Oyarsa made the world. ‘Did people in Thulcandra,’ they ask, ‘not know that Maleldil the Young had made and still ruled the world?’21 Ransom is shown the way to Meldilorn by the other spiritual beings of the planet, the eldila who are visible to Ransom only as a faint movement of light. Along the way he visits the sorn Augray, who acts as his host. From him Ransom learns that Oyarsa is the eldil who, at the creation of Malacandra, was put in charge of the planet. When Augray hears from Ransom about man’s wars, slavery and prostitution he thinks it must be ‘because every one of them wants to be a little Oyarsa himself’.22 He is surprised that there is only one rational species on Earth and supposes ‘this must have far-reaching effects in the narrowing of sympathies and even of thought’.23

  When presented to Oyarsa, Ransom cannot see him but he feels ‘a tingling of his blood and a pricking on his fingers as if lightning were near’.24 He learns from him the story of his planet as it is known throughout the solar system. Oyarsa explains that the Earth itself once had an Oyarsa. After he became ‘bent’ it was in his mind to spoil other worlds, and to prevent this Maleldil drove him out of the heavens and bound him in the air of his own planet. Oyarsa goes on to speak of what Ransom recognizes as the Incarnation. ‘There are stories among us’, Oyarsa says, that Maleldil ‘dared terrible things, wrestling with the Bent One in Thulcandra’.25

  Soon Weston and Devine are brought before Oyarsa, but not before they have managed to kill one of the hrossa. Weston imagines Oyarsa to be the most primitive of creatures and dangles beads before his eyes, saying ‘Pretty! pretty! See! See!’ The Malacandrians have never seen anything so comical and all Meldilorn shakes with laughter. ‘I may fall,’ says Weston. ‘But while I live I will not, with such a key in my hand, consent to close the gates of the future on my race. What lies in that future, beyond our present ken, passes imagination to conceive: it is enough for me that there is a Beyond.’26 When Weston protests his love of mankind, Oyarsa says, ‘What you really love is no completed creature but the very seed itself: for that is all that is left.’27 Weston and Devine are so ‘bent’ it is beyond Oyarsa’s ability to help them. As a penalty he orders their ship back to Thulcandra. Ransom, who is protected by the eldila, goes with them. Oyarsa gives orders that their ship will explode in ninety days, and they barely make it back to Earth in time. In Chapter 22 Lewis himself enters the story. Ransom tells him what happened on Malacandra, and he asks Lewis to write the story, passing it off as a work of fiction lest Weston sue for libel.

  After Out of the Silent Planet was published on 2 September 1938 some readers enjoyed it in spite of its Christian background, some because of it – and many without realizing it at all. But perhaps those who enjoyed it most did so in a way described by Dorothy L. Sayers* writing to Lewis on 21 December 1953 about a young friend of hers, Edmund Crispin. As mentioned in the previous chapter, Crispin was the author of the detective novel Swan Song in which Lewis is noticed going into the ‘Bird and Baby’ on Tuesdays. Said Miss Sayers:

  He told me how, in his undergraduate days, he read Out of the Silent Planet with great enjoyment, accepting it quite simply as a space-travel story … until quite suddenly near the end (not, I think, until Ransom had got to Meldilorn) some phrase clicked in his mind and he exclaimed: ‘Why, this is a story about Christianity. Maleldil is Christ, and the Eldila are the angels!’ He said it was a most wonderful experience, as though two entirely different worlds had suddenly come into focus together, like a stereoscope, and it’s a thing he can never forget.28

  Another undergraduate reader who had precisely the same experience was Roger Lancelyn Green, who remembered vividly the thrill of excitement – the sudden moment of Joy – when Oyarsa was telling Ransom of Thulcandra, the silent planet – ‘We think that Maleldil would not give it up utterly to the Bent One, and there are stories among us that He has taken strange counsel and dared terrible things, wrestling with the Bent One in Thulcandra’ – and he realized in a blinding flash to what Oyarsa was referring. Until then it seemed no more than one of the best stories of its kind he had read, and one of the most exciting and convincing: thereafter it was like stepping into a new dimension – one that he was to find again more fully explored in Perelandra, but which could never again come with the thrill of revelation of that first reading.

  Lewis’s choice of ‘Maleldil’ as the Old Solar name for God has continued to puzzle readers. Because the prefix ‘mal’ is often used to mean ‘ill’ or ‘wrong’ as in ‘malpractice’, it seems a curious syllable to use. In a letter to Victor Hamm of 11 August 1945 Lewis explained what it means: ‘MAL- is really equivalent of the definite article in some of the definite article’s uses. ELDIL means a lord or ruler, Maleldil “The Lord”: i.e. it is, strictly speaking, the Old Solar not for DEUS but for DOMINUS.’29 Marjorie Nicolson wrote, at the end of her great study of ancient Voyages to the Moon,

  Out of the Silent Planet is to me the most beautiful of all cosmic voyages and in some ways the most moving … As C.S. Lewis, the Christian apologist, has added something to the long tradition, so C.S. Lewis, the scholar-poet, has achieved an effect in Out of the Silent Planet different from anything in the past. Earlier writers have created new worlds from legend, from mythology, from fairy tale. Mr Lewis has created myth itself, myth woven of desires and aspirations deep-seated in some, at least, of the human race … As I journey with him into worlds at once familiar and strange, I experience, as did Ransom, ‘a sensation not of following an adventure but of enacting a myth’.30

  The book was well received by reviewers but did not have spectacular sales until the publication of The Screwtape Letters in 1942 and his broadcast talks on the radio during that and the following year made Lewis suddenly famous. But he seems to have had ideas of a sequel even before the publication of the book.

  The last chapter of Out of the Silent Planet hints at the ‘force or forces’ behind Weston which ‘will play a very important part in the events of the next few centuries, and, unless we can prevent them, a very disastrous one’; and ‘the dangers to be feared are not planetary but cosmic, or at least solar, and they are not temporal but eternal’.31 This might well seem a prelude to Perelandra; but what about the final words of the book? ‘Now that Weston has shut the doo
r, the way to the planets lies through the past; if there is to be any more space-travelling, it will have to be time-travelling as well … !’32

  Apparently Lewis had a tale of time-travel in his mind as the sequel and, before discarding it, even wrote at least sixty-four pages – all that survives of it: a tantalizing fragment found among his papers. Lewis does not seem to have written to anyone about it at the time of composition. However, Fr Gervase Mathew, the Inkling, on reading the manuscript recognized it at once. He remembered hearing Lewis read the first four chapters at a meeting of the Inklings in 1939 or 1940.

  The Dark Tower, as it has been named, is set in Cambridge, and it begins as a direct sequel to the last sentence just quoted of Out of the Silent Planet: ‘“Of course,” said Orfieu, “the sort of time-travelling you read about in books – time-travelling in the body – is absolutely impossible.”’33 The story continues:

  There were four of us in Orfieu’s study. Scudamour, the youngest of the party, was there because he was Orfieu’s assistant. MacPhee had been asked down from Manchester because he was known to us all as an inveterate sceptic, and Orfieu thought that if once he were convinced the learned world in general would have no excuse for incredulity. Ransom, the pale man with the green shade over his distressed-looking eyes, was there for the opposite reason – because he had been the hero, or victim, of one of the strangest adventures that had ever befallen a mortal man. I had been mixed up with that affair – the story is told in another book – and it was to Ransom I owed my presence in Orfieu’s party … 34

  After discussing the possibilities of time-travel, and deciding that it is impossible in the Wellsian sense of a bodily movement through time, Orfieu introduces his guests to the ‘Chronoscope’ – an instrument like a cinema projector which catches an apparently arbitrary time-sequence either past or future – we are not told which – and reflects it on a screen where it seems absolutely real and three-dimensional as if on a stage or through a window in time – but quite silent. (Subconsciously, Lewis may have got the idea from chapter 16 of Rider Haggard’s When the World Shook [1919], where Yva is able to catch light-rays and reflect them back from remote space to show Arbuthnot a similarly vivid picture of events happening 250,000 years ago.)