The Space Trilogy

If you could appreciate Screwtape, you'll be able to handle both Abolition and Strength. Abolition is a very short book, almost an extended essay, but packed with insight. I totally agree with CF - between Abolition (as a intellectual dissection) and Strength (as an imaginative expression), Lewis was one of the most accurate prophets of our current cultural situation. The more years I live, the more I see the insights and warnings that Lewis wrote of being borne out in this society. In my opinion, Strength is the most prophetic work of any kind to come out of the 20th century.

Also, if you can get your hands on a copy of the small collection of Lewis' essays called The Weight of Glory, you'll find within a work titled The Inner Ring. This analyzes intellectually some of the themes that are expressed imaginatively in Strength.
 
"Noman," since you mention them:

"Screwtape" can be used as a companion to "Silent Planet," because both were written under the shadow of World War Two, and both touch on the importance of language.

"Great Divorce" can be used as a companion to "Perelandra," because both imagine a paradisical setting, and both dramatize the solemn necessity of rejecting evil.
 
nomanisanexile said:
I need to read these again, i was about 12 or 13 the first time through and didn't make it all the way through That Hideous Strength I remember really liking the first 2 though......
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Welcome, Noman -- I didn't see you post before!

I'll just second what the guys have said. :)
 
I have just reread Out of the silent Planet. I have always thought that Malacandra (Mars) was an un-Fallen world. But I finally saw that it was a restored world. Kind of like Earth will be during the Millennium. It is kind of hard to understand though. The Fall didn't seem to be as complete as here on earth, but there was some kind of judgement that left a lot of the planet uninhabitable and the death of the bird creatures. And the fact the it appears that angels were sent to restore the planet and not Christ himself. But this may be because you get the impression that Malacandra's inhabitants are not in the image of God like Earth and Perelandra. I'm sure no one agrees with me though.:rolleyes:
 
I thought that Malacandra's downfall was caused by Satan's striking out from his base on the moon. Doesn't it say something like that? It was really our fallen Oyarsa on earth who reached out and blighted Malaandra with an ice age. Then the other Oyarsa's came and opened up the hot springs below the earth to make the habitable places so Malacanra could remain alive a while longer. It wasn't anything the Malacandran inhabitants did -- it was something done to them by our devil. That's what I read into it ...
 
Yes, it was an attack by Ouroborindra, a.k.a. Satan. He had attacked Mars because no sapient life had yet been created on Venus at the time.
 
And the attack was an external one. Malacandra had been an obedient world under its Oyarsa, and the archon of our world, Lucifer, attacked it. He persuaded some Malacandrans to follow him. Most stayed loyal to their own lord, but the devastation of the planet was incredible, necessitating the opening of the canals.

The difference between the assault on Mars and the fall of Earth was that on Earth the attack came at the root - the primordial couple were led astray, so the wound was much deeper. The enemy tried the same tactic on Perelandra.
 
Mr. Lewis, a man who accepted evolution, envisioned the saintly Martians as being subject to physical death EVEN THOUGH they were sinless; but they were all so close to God in relationship, that physical death DIDN'T MATTER. They had no fear of dying, because they KNEW it was only going to God.
 
PrinceOfTheWest said:
And the attack was an external one. Malacandra had been an obedient world under its Oyarsa, and the archon of our world, Lucifer, attacked it. He persuaded some Malacandrans to follow him. Most stayed loyal to their own lord, but the devastation of the planet was incredible, necessitating the opening of the canals.

The difference between the assault on Mars and the fall of Earth was that on Earth the attack came at the root - the primordial couple were led astray, so the wound was much deeper. The enemy tried the same tactic on Perelandra.
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We seem to be in eighty percent agreement PotW.

I have read enough of Lewis' non-fiction to see that he was a creation-evolutionist, meaning that God used evolution. But in his fiction Lewis seems to push a real Adam and Eve and a direct creation. How does one explain this dichotomy?:confused: I have always felt his fiction showed Lewis' true colors, while his non-fiction he used for academic cover.
 
I think you're overlaying a distinction which emerged after Lewis' time, and in a different culture (i.e. American).

Lewis stated several places that he didn't feel qualified to discuss nuances of biology upon which people much more educated than he could not agree. He assented to the possibility that there might have been some kind of emerging of complexity of species, but always subducted that to his assent to revealed truth. So he believed first and foremost that God created the heavens and the earth, but didn't want to get caught up in the mechanics by which He did that. (After all, there is a lot we're not told in the early Genesis accounts.) He did do an excellent job of demolishing popular evolutionism from a philosophical standpoint.

As far as reconciling what he wrote with what he thought of history, keep in mind that he was writing a story, which relieves on of some of the burden of being completely consistent. I've written stories myself in which I felt no need to perfectly reconcile the situation I'm writing with my entire world view - I was only dealing with a bit of life, not the whole thing.
 
Sorry, I meant to use the term Theistic-Evolutionist to discribe Lewis. :eek:

I am sorry also PotW, but I don't buy that. Why write the Space Trilogy, where it stesses an actual creation, an actual Fall of Adam and Eve, and the other Pre-Genesis 12 events as being true when if you are a theistic evolutionist you can't believe any of it is any more than myths. I really feel that he wanted to put these events out as historical truths and used fiction as just cover. He may have called it fanasty, but it was realistic. Now I don't believe the stuff about Authur and Atlantis is true, but I do think Lewis felt these other myths pointed to the reality of the Bible. If Lewis just wrote of the Biblical events because he wanted to just teach a purely spiritual and allegorical gospel he would have been an existenialist. But Lewis never wrote as an existenialist. Remember Lewis actually believe Jesus is God and that Jesus wouldn't have been taken in if Adam and Eve was just Myth that had some allegorical truth. After all at what point does God stop teaching myth and won't give man the true story even when God is standing on the earth and can finally get the true story out.
 
Well, here we're speculating on what was going through (or not going through) Lewis' head as he wrote his stories, how he reconciled that with his personal view of creation, and how he reconciled the fantasy worlds he wrote about with the world we live in. Even if we were sitting down with him, that would be an interesting discussion! Also, his stories were written over spans of years, during which his understandings and viewpoints matured and changed (as mine have - at least I hope they've matured!)

I also reiterate my contention that you're overlaying onto Lewis' thinking some distinctions that were unknown to his intellectual environment. We might categorize Lewis as a "theistic evolutionist", but my guess is that he wouldn't. Keep in mind that a lot of the distinctions which we've made (e.g. "Young Earth", "Old Earth", "Six-Day", etc.) are peculiar to America, home of fundamentalism and origin of many of these disputes. Though I can't recall any of his works wherein he carefully detailed his thoughts regarding the mechanics of creation and how it meshed with salvation history, I'm pretty sure that it would be very difficult to categorize.

Also, Lewis wouldn't have used the term "just myth". He tried to, but Tolkien sharply corrected him, and Lewis ended up being one of the most eloquent proponents of the idea that myth was truth wrapped in mystery. When Lewis called the Gospels "The Great Myth", he was by no means discounting the historicity, but stating that mere historical account could only begin to capture the depth and wonder of what had happened at the Incarnation. He surely thought the same way about the accounts of the Creation, Fall, Flood, etc.

I hope I'm understanding you properly - I've tried to answer what I think you said. Forgive me if I missed the mark.
 
So I was watching the news the other day, and a report comes on saying how scientists have found water on the moon, followed by what it could mean to humanity and life on other planets.

And the first thing that came to my mind was "Space Trilogy".

I find similarities to the thinking of Weston in "Out of the Silent Planet", i.e, preservation of the human race, jumping from planet to planet.

I also thought of how Lewis described the world on the moon in "That Hideous Strength".
 
Simply _going_ to another world would not be automatically evil. But Weston was willing to have _exterminated_ alien races along the way.
 
Copperfox said:
Simply _going_ to another world would not be automatically evil. But Weston was willing to have _exterminated_ alien races along the way.
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Exactly. That was what Lewis feared about humans being in space. One shudders at the thought of a Hitler, or a Stalin, or a Mao, or Bin Laden on Mars or one of the moons of Jupiter.
 
brush off

I've been listening to a Teaching Company lecture series on Masterpieces of the Imaginative Mind and was very disappointed by Professor Eric S. Rabkin's brush off of C.S. Lewis's space trilogy in his lecture on Religion and Science Fiction. He mentioned Lewis in passing but said his work was "too doctrinaire" to be of interest to anyone but Christians (!Go figure.). So besides a ten second overview of the plot threads, he basically ignored Lewis' work.

[major Dislike]
 
I know Rabkin's type very well. When he says "doctrinaire" or "narrow-minded," he MEANS "not agreeing with MY narrow doctrines."
 
That Hideous Strength is actually my favorite; I read it before Perelandra. I love them all, of course. Perelandra is awesome and I love how the protagonist must convince Eve not to eat the forbidden fruit. Very cool battle of words against Weston.

THS connected with me deeply. Mark and Jane Studdock's modern philosophy I recognize everywhere; Wither and Frost seem like actual teachers and people I have met before. Merlin brings in the old-world feel of righteousness and servitude to God. Even though he was a druid in art and dress, he lived in Arthurian times, which took place after Christ. Merlin was a Christian, and used his powers for good only. The NICE forgot this and assumed Merlin would join them b/c they had the power and numbers.

I can't even summarize all the things I love about that book. I've read it through twice already. I just finished my second read of Out of the Silent Planet again.
 
Well said, Auhin. Did you ever read Mr. Lewis' nonfiction book, "The Abolition of Man"? That is like a companion volume for "Hideous Strength." Taken together, these two books constitute Mr. Lewis' astonishingly accurate prediction of the evil trends which would be at work during the four decades after his passing.
 
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