This is Life!: Revolutions Around the Cruciform Axis

Perelandra, Chs. 5-8

Last week, we began Perelandra with Life as freedom and grace. This week's reading reveals a contrast of life as determinism and force. One is the Life received from Maleldil and which proceeds from each good to another good; or, as the Gospel writer John says, from grace to grace. The other life is that which is a law unto itself and which is self-enclosed.

Ransom, through his own experience on Perelandra, and through discussion with Perelandra's Queen, experienced no want, either of hunger or thirst, on Perelandra's floating islands. In fact, for the first time in the first eight chapters and one hundred eight pages (in my edition) Ransom experiences hunger, thirst, and pain when on the Fixed Land. Maleldil has made it a law Perelandra that one is not to spend the night on the Fixed Land. The Fixed Land represents the antithesis of the Life of gracious gifts received among the floating islands and their flora and fauna. The Fixed Land is life as determined.

It is precisely on this point that Weston, now possessed by the Bent One in a scene as disturbing in its representation as it is in its brevity, attempts to insert the anti-gospel. Weston is the messenger of biological determinism romanticized. This is the life of Force, which "progresses" ever onward, "advancing" knowledge, yielding greater power and control. It is an anti-gospel which preaches greater "freedom" but which enslaves its adherents to a fatalist existence. Weston sees Ransom and the Queen, both naked and in something like an embrace, and assumes a sexual encounter. He assumes this not because he is some sort of puritancial prude. Rather he assumes it because, for him, life is irreducibly biological and the sexual urge is among the most basic and powerful of biology's forces.

Ransom, however, knows different. After only a brief reflection on the non-erotic experience of his encounters with the Lady of Perelandra, his is an experience of freedom and gratitude. He does not think of provision, because Perelandra (and Maleldil) is abundant in its gifts. If he is hungry, there is that which he may eat. If he is thirsty, that which he may drink. He sleeps and knows deep refreshment. He is not troubled by biology and its needs and urges because his is an existence transformed by grace. "I have food of which you know not," said Jesus to his disciples. "My food is to do the will of him who sent me."

Alexander Schmemann, in his book Great Lent, notes that the first temptation of the Devil is to food, to life as merely biological. The Church's great ascetics see through this facade. Their ascetical feats are such at which we marvel. But our awe is founded in our warped thinking. The Church's ascetics know the truth which we forget or cannot hear for the cacophonous cackling of our world's great hucksters: we live not by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God. Our biology is not our fate. We are not slaves to our passions, urges and orientations. We are sons and daughters of God.

The Queen of Perelandra knows this, as does Ransom. But Weston has begun his great tempting of Perelandra's Lady to fight this knowledge. And this world-shaping testing will soon reach its culmination.

Posted by Clifton at July 14, 2003 09:28 PM | TrackBack