Light On Dark Water

Sunday Night Journal — April 4, 2004

Since my first reading, many years ago, of Perelandra,
I’ve often reflected on one particular symbol from it. It
comes to me unbidden when I attempt to examine my conscience and
to discover what mental forces are at work in me to undo my
(rather feeble) good intentions. That is the placement of the
human couple, the Adam and Eve of Perelandra, on floating islands
in a world mostly covered in water, and their being prohibited by
God from living on the little fixed land that does exist. They
can visit there, but the temptation which occupies for them the
place of the Tree of Knowledge in our story is the violation of
God’s decree that they are not to pass a night there. Lewis
develops this into what seems to me a very rich symbol for our
essential problem: we want to hang on to things. We want to hang
on to persons and to physical things, and we do not want any
pleasure to end, or if it must end we want to be able to retrieve
it from the past by repeating it whenever we like. We do not want
to surrender ourselves to a will not our own and an order not of
our own making (especially since, as is often the case, the order
is not apparent to us). In Perelandra every new day and every new
wave of the great sea bring a new gift, but only so long as the
man and woman are willing to let its predecessor go into the
past. They are to trust perfectly that God will provide, and as
earnest of this trust they are to remain on the floating islands
where nothing remains the same for very long. The Eve of
Perelandra explains it:

The reason for not yet living on the Fixed Land is now
so plain. How could I wish to live there except because it was
Fixed? And why should I desire the Fixed except to make
sure—to be able on one day to command where I should be the
next and what should happen to me? It was to reject the
wave—to draw my hands out of Maleldil’s, to say to
Him, “Not thus, but thus”—to put in our own
power what times should roll toward us.

There is an erroneous, indeed a sinful, approach to this same
aspect of reality. We heard a great deal of it in the 1960s, when
it seemed a new and liberating idea, and it still turns up,
although it seems to me that there are not now very many people
who embrace it explicitly, for it is now too widely seen to be
the self-serving dodge that it is. It is to use the fact that
nothing in our world is truly permanent as an excuse for breaking
faith, for refusing to make and honor commitments. It would be
difficult to count the number of pop songs written since 1965 or
so in which a lover—usually a man speaking to a woman, but
sometimes the other way round—tells his once-beloved that
what they had was very nice but now it’s time for him to
move on. The song generally conveys a strong note of
self-congratulation: I’m bound to ramble, I can’t be
chained, I’ve got to be free—meaning, I am too pure
and strong a soul to allow myself to be limited and confined by
petty rules. In the devil’s typically slick perversion of
truth, the fact that everything does indeed change in our world,
and that nothing indeed does last, is used to justify disregard
of the plain demands of real love—which is to say, of
God’s law. It is as if the Adam and Eve of Perelandra were
to say to Maleldil (God): Yes, we know you forbade us to live
upon the fixed land. But that was yesterday. We’re just
embracing change, as you told us to do.

It is some such attempt to use God’s own commands
against each other that the devil in Perelandra attempts, and
that he uses on us. This logic has a certain sophistic
plausibility to anyone who has lost sight of the fact that we owe
to the Creator certain duties of fealty upon which our enjoyment
of the Creation depend. The true Fixed Land is not any place
where our bodies can stand, but the holy will of God Himself, and
when we step out of that we step, as the Eve of Perelandra says,
into nowhere, a condition from which we can no longer see or know
or obtain the thing in pursuit of which we left the Will, because
it is back there in the Creation, and therefore in the Will, not
with us in the nowhere. This is how, pursuing what we think are
our lives, we lose them.

I noticed in this reading of Perelandra something I
hadn’t noticed in earlier readings. I’ve often
wondered, more or less idly, what people would do in an
unfallen world. With no evil to produce dramatic conflict, would
not the inhabitants of an earthly paradise inevitably end (if
they did not suffer a fall) in an infantile condition as passive
recipients of sweet things? Lewis provides an interesting
possibility when he has the Adam (and King) of Perelandra
describe the future of the race of which he is the first
father:

“On the Fixed Land which once was forbidden,” said
Tor the King, “we will make a great place to the splendour
of Maleldil. Our sons shall bend the pillars of rock into
arches…. And there our sons will make images….We will
fill this world with our children. We will know this world to the
center. We will make the nobler of the beasts so wise that they
will become hnau [rational creatures] and
speak….”

And he goes on to describe even vaster enterprises. In short,
the people of Perelandra will have work to do, but work done for
the joy of making their world even finer that it already is,
rather than for the purpose of averting want and pain. They are
to join Maleldil in a continuing work of creation. It may well be
that that is what we lost, or mostly lost, in the Fall. And it
may have something to do with our esteem of those works of human
hands which are created for themselves and which have no
immediate purpose except to be beautiful.