Perelandra (Ch.1/Part 3)

After character Lewis confesses that he had his own encounter with an eldil and has been “drawn in” to Ransom’s adventure, he confesses “Yet here we were both getting more and more involved in what I could only describe as interplanetary politics” (2656). And Ransom later says to character Lewis, “You are feeling the absurdity of it. Dr. Elwin Ransom setting out single-handed to combat powers and principalities. You may even be wondering if I’ve got megalomania” (2877). It seems fair, then, to claim that “interplanetary politics” and “powers and principalities” refer to the same thing

St. Paul tells us that the church struggles against “principalities and powers” and not flesh and blood (Eph.6:12). ” Principalities and powers” are created good (Col.1:16) to establish and sustain the conditions that make and keep human life human and humane. They somehow fell and rebelled against God and each sought supremacy over the others and humanity. The result is the chaotic and intractable problems and struggles that keep us divided against one another and turn our best ideas and creations against us and the human good. Against the rebellious machinations of these powers Jesus struggled, defeating them at the cross (Col.2:15) and presently working to pacify and restore them to their created purposes. Some still rebel, however, though their struggle is a lost cause. Jesus’ followers are called and equipped to participate in this ongoing work of Jesus. This is our calling and mission.

Ransom is sent to Perelandra to take up this struggle to keep the Green Lady, the Eve of that unfallen world, from succumbing to her temptation to turn away from Maleldil (God/Christ) and bring the baleful reality of sin, sorrow, and death to Perelandra (Venus).

Do you know that as a follower of Jesus you too are “conscripted” to battle against the principalities and powers of our world. Those powers that confuse, deceive, disorder, and even destroy the good order God intended them to establish and maintain. Biblical scholar Luke Johnson helps us understand this in this extended quotation:

“The rational discourse offered by the social sciences cannot adequately describe, much less comprehend, the horrors of the past century. The Shoah; the gulag; the Cambodian killing fields: these systemic exercises in oppression, which involved the mass capture and destruction of the innocent, remain profoundly mysterious. Not even the megalomaniacal pretensions of Hitler and Stalin and Pol Pot can account for the furious passion for destruction generated among the thousands of functionaries through whom evil was organized and administered. A somber conclusion arises from our common experience of life: there exist powers, at work in and through humans yet commanding a superhuman blind energy, that labor not for the good, but for the destruction of humans and of all human beauty and grace. Such powers cannot adequately be named by the language of social description; they require the language of myth. It is important to be able to speak of the Devil . . .

“Christians do not need to seek out another holocaust, gulag, or genocide in order to identify the deceitful, captivating, and oppressive patterns characteristic of Satan. Such patterns are evident all around us. They manifest themselves in systems of addiction—to drink, drugs, gambling, sex—that enslave people in our culture and bring ruin to them and destroy their families. The power at work behind such patterns of addiction is both personal and systemic. Pushers and enablers and pimps represent a system of enslavement—literally, in the case of prostitution—that transcends the intentions and acts even of the individuals caught up in such systems. The church is able to extend the liberating ministry of Jesus through a kind of communal exorcism when in the power of the Holy Spirit it names such systems as demonic, refuses to enable them in its own common life, and provides an alternative mode of life characterized by the freedom of faith within the community. To speak of the Devil in such contexts of communal exorcism is to speak properly.

Similarly, liberation theologians have properly identified the ‘powers and principalities’ at work in patterns of social behavior that systematically deceive, enslave, and oppress those who are ‘other’ and vulnerable. Linguistic purists may shudder at the terms employed in such critical analyses. But racism, sexism, ageism, and homophobia are real, and their capacity to damage and destroy, even as they corrupt those who practice them, is powerful indeed. The church’s call to exorcize such demonic systems is clear. Once more, the act of liberation begins with naming such systems for what they are: the work of powers and principalities—the Devil’s work—intended to hurt God by harming humans. But naming is just a beginning. The church must also reject and repudiate such demonic systems within its own common life. So long as sexism and homophobia and racism are practiced within the community that claims allegiance to Christ, the church simply colludes, in a profoundly corrupt fashion, with the Devil’s work.

“Does this mean that language about the demonic is never appropriately used for the trials and testings of individuals? No, but it must be used much more circumspectly, at least until we learn to get this language right once again. To speak of those caught in the webs of deceit and destruction spun by the agents of addiction and social alienation as ‘tormented by the Devil’ is to speak in a manner consonant with the language of the Gospels. Yet just as language about God’s activity is trivialized and emptied when associated with, say, successful free-throw shooting, so is language about the Devil corrupted when attached to such quotidian impulses as profane speech or irritability. The Letter of James sorts it well when it describes the envy that causes murder and war as issuing from a ‘wisdom from below’ that is ‘devilish,’ but refrains from such language when speaking of the garden-variety temptation in which “one is tempted by one’s own desire, being lured and enticed by it.

“The church as the body of Christ must seek to provide a community that opposes those life-destroying social dynamics that are properly called demonic. The church that lives by the vision of the prophet Jesus and the Holy Spirit bestowed by him is called to embrace more than to exclude, to reconcile more than to alienate, to cultivate the reciprocity of diverse gifts within the body of Christ more than the suppression of gifts in the name of good order: in short, to enable the full participation in the life of the community precisely for those whom the Devil’s counterkingdom would rob of such full participation. This is not easy work, for, as Paul declares, ‘our struggle is not against blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.’ Yet it is serious and necessary work, for whatever else he may be, the Devil is no joke” (“Powers and Principalities: The Devil is No Joke,” https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/powers-principalities).

 What this strange commingling of language we usually keep separate does is to mix the “intolerable strangeness which this universe imposes on us” with our daily mundane and familiar lives. For character Lewis it exposed this division of natural/supernatural, real/mythical as a defense mechanism against what is really going on in our world.

He learns from Ransom that the world is an enemy-occupied territory, held down by (bent) eldila who were at war both with us and with the eldila of “Deep Heaven,” or “space” (2681).

Slowly but surely character Lewis comes to believe that Ransom is not, in truth, insane but sane - saner than most in fact. He begins to see that his (and our) conventional way of seeing life was “a comfortable set of blinkers, an agreed mode of wishful thinking, which excluded from our view the full strangeness and malevolence of the universe we are compelled to inhabit?” (2727).

Character Lewis encounter with the eldil, the Oyarsa of Malcandra (Mars), deepens his conversion. Its impression of standing slanted to the horizontal floor (by our standards) left Lewis with the certainty that “this creature had reference to some horizontal, to some whole system of directions, based outside the Earth, and that its mere presence imposed that alien system on me and abolished the terrestrial horizontal” ( 2789).

Further, character Lewis learns a valuable lesson about goodness: ”I felt sure that the creature was what we call ‘good,’ but I wasn’t sure whether I liked ‘goodness’ so much as I had supposed” (2797-98). Author Lewis makes the same point in his Narnia Chronicles when he depicts the great lion Aslan, the Christ-figure in the stories, as good and terrible at the same time. He’s talking about holiness, biblically speaking. That supreme reality of God that according to Rudolf Otto attracts and repels us at the same time. In Christ we see it as well, only in him we realize that that goodness and terribleness, that love and power, are for us and not against us, for our wholeness and well-being, our healing and help. Thus we can praise and trust him with both affection and an appropriate fear and reverence.

Character Lewis is now fully “drawn in.” His life was no longer his own. “The next decision did not lie with me” (2802), he says. And Ransom’s mission begins with character Lewis and readers with more fully aware of what is truly going on and what is really at stake in it.