Light On Dark Water

Sunday Night Journal — March 28, 2004

I have been listening to a recording of C. S. Lewis’s
Perelandra while driving home from work most weekday
evenings. This is intended to be a piece of Lenten seriousness.
If listening to this reading is not penitential it is certainly a
source of spiritual renewal, and it does require that I give up
my usual habit of listening to music. His work has been an
enormous influence on me and it remains fresh. When I was
returning to faith in my late twenties after a long period of
wandering, Lewis was of great help in inducing me to go ahead and
step over the line between vague religiosity and real belief. In
particular The Screwtape Letters, Miracles, and the
space trilogy (Out of the Silent Planet,
Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength) were part of
and remain associated with a sort of mental springtime of
awakening and expectation.

There is, accordingly, a bit of nostalgia in my continuing
enjoyment of these books. My wife and I were entering the
Episcopal Church, and the very English Christianity of Lewis and
Tolkien seemed (and still seems) our spiritual home. I never take
up any of the space trilogy without remembering several long
drives in which I read them aloud, sometimes with a flashlight,
while she drove (roles dictated by her inability to read in a car
without getting sick). It was not many years before we left the
Episcopal Church, convinced simultaneously of the authority of
the Catholic Church, and of the incipient apostasy of the
Episcopal. But as it does for many, Lewis’s work transcends
that division.

One of Lewis’s great strengths, one of the first I
noticed in his work, and one which occupies a central place in
Perelandra, is his ability to communicate the psychology
of temptation. If I remember correctly I was not yet entirely
convinced of Christian claims when I read The Screwtape
Letters, but I remember thinking that whether or not he was
right in his doctrine he certainly knew human nature. The great
event in Perelandra is the tempting of the queen, but it
is the tempting of Ransom, whose task is literally to fight the
devil, which is most vividly drawn. The queen, after all, is
sinless and her consciousness difficult for us to imagine, while
Ransom is one of us.

I am enjoying this book, but its precise explication of
Ransom’s intense desire to seem to do God’s
will as he struggles with equal intensity to justify evading it
is painful, because I know myself to be guilty of the same
dishonesty and stand condemned before this judgment. So there is
some penance here after all.