Perelandra: Ch.3

In perhaps one of the greatest chapters in the book Lewis offers a grand and gorgeous and sensuous description of a place ever penned. The unfallen grandeur of the planet, its virginal character, its unimaginable beauty is so masterfully done by Lewis that it defies my ability to summarize or do justice to. You really need to just read it for yourself.

One can only imagine this setting if one imagined oneself sitting in Eden trying to write down what one saw, felt, and experienced. This “warm, maternal, delicately gorgeous world” (3092) defies, as I said, my poor ability to summarize Lewis’ description of it. I confine myself to a few brief comments and leave it for you to read and luxuriate in the original.

Excess is perhaps the best single word to capture this unfallen reality. Lewis communicates this is many ways in this chapter, only three of which I draw your attention to:

1.   

       Lewis notes that the reality of Perelandra exceeds earthly reality to such a degree that one might be tempted to call in “nonsenuous.” But it’s even more than that. He has Ransom finally settle on “transenuous” as a description (3035).  Let that play with your mind for a bit.

2.      Further, our bodily appetites and drives do not disappear, contrary to much Christian teaching, rather they “disappear, not because they were atrophied but because they were . . . as (Ransom) said ‘engulfed’” (3039). Presumably Lewis means that somehow they are caught up in a larger and greater reality in which we experience in their fullness and as the Creator intended such that our former experience of them seems foreign though maybe also somewhat familiar too. This may be what Lewis is getting at elsewhere when he writes:

“It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased” (C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory, and Other Addresses).

3.     

 The reality of Perelandra also overwhelms language. When Lewis opines that this is because our language to too vague, Ransom retorts, “The reason why the thing can’t be expressed is that it’s too definite for language” (3043).

Lewis sums all this up the effect of Perelandra on Ransom like a “strange sense of excessive pleasure which seemed somehow to be communicated to him through all his senses at once” (3111).

The description of Perelandra in all its excess of what we experience now on earth ought at least free our imaginations from the too pedestrian, too ordinary ideas we frequently entertain about God’s New Creation. If it’s not an endless playing of harps and singing praise songs to God, which seems very boring to a musically illiterate like me, or a sexless forever, we tend to have too few imaginings of its “excessive” reality which takes us through and beyond our present experience to something we can only stammer and stutter about. And that’s just what the Christian doctrine of creation and new creation requires!