I read Out Of The Silent Planet by C.S. Lewis over the last couple days, and I have so many things swirling in my brain I thought I better get them typed out into a post before I lose them. I decided my thoughts on this book were going to be long enough to justify their own post, but I do hope to do a full reading update soon!
I tried reading Lewis's space trilogy a couple years ago, and was so confused by it that I quickly lost steam. When I decided to give it another try recently, I did a little research first and read the first few chapters of Deeper Heaven by Christiana Hale. She explains that what Lewis was trying to do in this series is to recover some of the beauty of the medieval idea of the structure of the universe, through the way he structures the universe of the Ransom Trilogy. C. S. Lewis was, as I was reminded in Deeper Heaven, a professor of medieval and Renaissance English after all! So while some of the details of space in these books do not fit with the cold, hard facts of what we know space to be materially, he is trying to create a merging of the old medieval understanding of the universe with a physical journey through space and spiritual truths from Christianity. The result is a really interesting combination of medieval cosmology/mythology and Christian principles in this fantastical version of space.
An interesting aspect to me is how Lewis brings back the medieval idea of a "personality" assigned to the planets, but rather than in the form of false gods from mythology, in this book the personalities are angels that are given charge over the planets. Ransom gets to meet one as he travels to Mars, along with other intelligent beings who have souls and all worship the one true God (named Meleldil in their terminology).
In medieval cosmological structure, which Lewis is incorporating into this book, the Fall only affected the area beneath the moon, so the planet Ransom visits is "unfallen", not affected in the same way by the sin of mankind. This is one example of how this series does NOT fit well into the reality of what we see in Scripture - Romans 8 tells us that creation itself is subjected to the corruption of our sin, and I don't see anyplace in Scripture where certain realms of the physical creation are exempt from this. However, in the Ransom series, a certain element of "corruption" on these other planets may come in the form of the death of these other souled beings that Ransom meets - another questionable idea when compared with the Bible, because Scripture tells us that death entered the world through our sin.
Perhaps in the world that Lewis has created here, the death of these creatures is supposed to be connected with mankind's sin, the "groaning" and "corruption" they experience on other planets - but again, the Bible doesn't indicate that there are other intelligent beings who suffer physical death because of man's sin, so this is definitely an imaginative stretch.
Ransom also seems to think that animals lived on the earth for some extent of time prior to man, which would be another thing inconsistent with a reading of the creation in Genesis being six literal days. However, we also see Ransom having to reorient his thinking away from his conception of "science" and toward deeper truths, and his internal dialogue about his views on creation and creatures is changing throughout the story, so I'm not sure Lewis was making any sort of statement about his own view on how God created the world here.
Aside from a few inconsistencies and stretching of biblical concepts, I thought this book was really fascinating. What Frank Peretti's This Present Darkness did in speculating about the workings of demons, Out Of the Silent Planet does in imagining the world of angels and creating a system for how they could live in the medieval conception of the universe.
If I hadn't started reading Deeper Heaven at the same time as the Ransom series, I would have been thoroughly confused. But with the insights into Lewis from that book in the back of my mind, I could see what Lewis was trying to do in creating other "worlds" under the authority of angels, who are themselves under the authority of God.
Armed with a little more background information, I can look past some of the questionable theological aspects and see the beauty of the story he's trying to create here. I may not agree with everything that is said in the books, and I don't think everything is in line with the knowledge we are given in the Bible. But there is some value in various spiritual principles communicated through the book - I can pick out the good stuff, and recognize the rest as fantastical elements created for this story to work (sort of as you do with a fairytale, or with other Lewis books such as Narnia). I was particularly moved by considering man's fall into sin from the perspective of these fictional, unfallen cultures and personalities. It turns your mind to all we lost when Adam and Eve sinned, and all we will regain when God creates a new heavens and new earth for His redeemed people someday. I'm really curious to read the next book!
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