101 - Introduction to Perelandra

to Perilandro. If you've never read this book before, well, I mean, obviously I recommend the entire series. I mean, this is just an absolutely beautiful text and I really look forward to getting into it with you. In fact, let's go ahead and do that. Hello, and welcome back as we settle in for Perilandrum. Now, as I've said before, these intro videos aren't really gonna get into plot elements.

I'm gonna keep this rather short. The purpose of this is to first introduce you to some relevant secondary reading, as well as to provide you with a framework for picking up some of the major themes that are going to un provide the path that Lewis is laying out for us. I remember I talked about before, how for Lewis, the driving elements of a story are not the particular things that happen. It's not the twists and turns of

the plot, as interesting as this may be. But for Lewis, the driving force of the story is the end, the tayloss, the goal. That goal is a state of being rather

than a state of becoming. And so in this story, he's going to lead us from particular instantiations of desire and of pleasure up to their ideal toward the fulfillment, toward that which makes pleasurable things pleasurable, that which makes desirous things desirable by those who are seeing clearly, because there are certain things that speak to realities of human nature that are desirable when we are oriented correctly, right, when we are not corrupted, when we are not bent

to borrow language from out of the silent planet. And so as far as secondary reading goes, obviously the main secondary ransom texts that I talked about in last week certainly apply here. So that's planets in peril, deeper Heaven, and a compass for deep Heaven, and so those text deal with the entire Ransdom series, so they certainly apply here as well, and as far as specifically looking at secondary texts for Perilandrum, I'm going to recommend three Lewis

essays to you. Two of them come from the collection under the title of The Weight of Golfe named for the first essay in this collection, and what might be the most useful, the most directly applicable essay for Peralandrum, and that's because the Weight of Glory he talks a lot about desire, about the things that naturally speak to natural human desires, when we are working according to nature, when we aren't bent, when we aren't corrupted, when we

don't have these artificial lenses over our souls. In fact, connected to that idea of desire, he even uses the imagery of the morning Star of Venus in order to make his point, and so that provides us with a rather direct connection point to where we're going to be

going in Perilandrum. Also we're gonna see in Peralantro we get some more direct relationships being developed here between Lewis's Christianity and his appreciation for pagan mythology, and so along those lines, another essay from the Weight of Glory that I'm going to recommend to you is called is Theology Poetry, and he deals with some of those connections between Christian thought and pagan methody, and how that we don't actually need to discount pagan mythology despite the fact that it

gets a lot wrong. In fact, he clearly believes that pagan mythology gets a lot right, which is exactly what we should expect from people who are made in God's image, living in God's creation, which testifies to the reality of who God is that's unfolding across time and then chiefly revealed in the Gospel. And so that is theology of poetry from the weight of Glory. And then still on

that point from God. In the doc I'm going to recommend to you myth Became Fact, which is probably one of my all time favorite essays, which deals with these same themes of the relationship between Christianity, Christian revelation, and pagan mythology. And in case you don't have these texts, you're not able to pick them up right away. I will provide those three essays for you in the modules, but I would strongly encourage you to pick up these

collections and read through them in their entirety. In fact, the Way of Glory isn't really that long. I just recently read through the Hire Book again in one morning and afternoon, and so that's very doable. But do yourself, favorite, go ahead and get both these books and read them through.

But for now, what I want to do is, let's walk through a few passages from the Weight of Glory that I think are going to set up your orientation well for encountering what happens in Perilandra in the third region.

Venus voyages, but my voice falters, rude, rimemaking, wrongs, her beauty, whose breast and brow and her breast sweetness be which the world's widespread, the rain of her secret scepter in the sea's caverns, in grass growing and grain bursting, flower unfolding, and flesh longing, in shower falling sharp in april, the metal copper in the mind reddens with muffled brightness, like

muted gold by her fingers formed. And that is from C. S. Lewis's poem The Planets, which I recommend reading in its entirety, And in fact, I'll go ahead and put that in this week's module now as I said, I want to mostly focus on his essay The Weight of Glory, and I'm not even going to provide a lot of extended

commentary here. What I want to do is just point your attention to certain passages that get at some ongoing themes that are going to develop throughout the story, and then in the next video I'll go back and look at some of these in reference to the story itself. But near the beginning of this essay, Lewis writes, if you ask twenty good men today what they thought the highest of the virtues, nineteen of them would reply unselfishness. But if you had asked almost any of the great

Christians of old, he would have replied love. You see what has happened. A negative term has been substituted for positive. And this is of more than philological importance. And so he's pointing out that this change has taken place is not just a superficial change in language, but actually a change in philosophy. It's a change in theology, so change in the way that we see people, the way that

we see the world. And in fact, if you ask twenty people today what the highest virtue is, they might say something like tolerance, which is connected to the same idea of unselfishness, the idea being that the best that I can do is not interfere with your life, right because I mean, there is no truth, there is no goodness, there is no beauty, there's no reality, there's no inherent meaning in life. We're all just sort of fabricating it

out of nothingness. And so the worst thing that I can do is to impede your right to self creation. That's a very postmodern idea. That is just a further development of what Lewis was dealing with in his own day. But you go back, as he said, you asked the great Christians of old, and they would have said that the chief virtue is love, that we actually very much are meant to interfere in other people's lives for the better. Aristotle to find love as willing the good of the other.

And what that means is that we need to have some understanding of what the good is, and we need to give ourselves over to the good for the sake of others, even if that means we might have to interfere in their lives. The message of Christianity is not that God cares about us so much that he's going to leave us alone. That actually wouldn't be caring for us at all. Know, the message of Christianity is that God actually loves us, and that's precisely why Christ gaves

himself over for our good. And so too, the Christian message is that we are to give ourselves over for the good of others. Husbands are supposed to love their wives as Christ love the Church and gave himself over for her. And then generally, in our relationships with others, we are told to love one another as Christ has loved us. And so we have a call not just to be unselfish, not just to leave people alone, but to actually better the lives of those around us, to

give ourselves over for the good of others. And Lewis goes on to say, the New Testament has loss to say about self denial, but not about self denial as an end in itself. We are told to deny ourselves and to take up our crosses in order that we may follow Christ. And nearly every description of what we shall ultimately find if we do contains an appeal to desire. And so this is connected the same thing I just tak talking about that the chief virtue is not just unselfishness.

It's not just about not satisfying your own personal desires. No, we actually are to satisfy our deepest longings. Our deepest

desires speak to that which is deeply desirable. Odds are everyone here's familiar with the argument from Mere Christianity, whether you've actually read Mere Christianity or not, that Lewis talks about the fact that you know, we have these deep desires for another world, for paradise, and just as our desire for food and drink point to the fact that there is reality to food and drink, so too, perhaps our deep longings for something that we can't find in

this world are good indicator that there really is something beyond this world, something like our home country, that we never find in this world around us, but that we anticipate with every good and beautiful and true thing. Because the chief Christian virtue is love, we are willing and we are able to practice the right kind of self denied, with the hope that in self denial, in surrendering the world, we will actually get it back anew, We'll get it

back glorified. But there is no Easter without good Friday there is no crown without the cross. And keep in mind that Parallantra takes place right on the heels of out of the side of the planet. Ransom is literally commissioned by the Oyarsa of Mars. And keep in mind what the Martian influence means, right, this symbolized strength, power, rigidity. It's kind of fearsome. Remember when Oyarsa said that if it was in his jurisdiction to do so, he would

have just killed the humans on his planet. And so there is a violence here. However, in the true Martian spirit it this is a brutal, harsh, violent tendency that is submitted toward a greater reality. And so Ayarsa does follow the regulations imposed upon him in the natural order of the cosmos, and so he doesn't have jurisdiction to unbody the humans on his planet, and so he doesn't do so. And so he has strength and he has power, and he's willing to exercise it when it is within

his rights to do so. But the true Martian influence means not just that you have strength, but you have the strength to withhold that strength and submission to a

greater reality. This is a nightly kind of strength. And of course what do knights do and all the great stories, they protect and serve and submit themselves to the good of damsels, and so too, Ransom is going off on a quest to serve and to protect the Lady of perilandr But even this is just a particular that's pointing us to a grander reality, because really, what's going on here,

is it? Not just Ransom is serving the Lady of Perolandra. Really, what we have here is the martial spirit is serving the Venusian spirit. This Martian spirit is using its strength in service to the ultimate good and in sacrificial devotion to the Venusian Spirit. And so Lewis here is really starting to lay out his philosophy and his theology of gender, and that is going to come into rather direct terms toward the end of Perilandra, and so talk with that

more in the next video. But I just wanting to keep that in mind that in this story that Ransom really is a stand in for Mars, just as the Queen of Perilandra is a stand in for Venus. And we're going to see that dance develop from the particular up to the universal. And now I'm not gonna say a whole lot about this, but just continuing this theme of desire and this movement of desire from the particular in the surface level to the reality, or, to use Plato's language,

this movement from the shadow up to substance. And so Lewis writes, Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half hearted creatures,

falling about with drink and sex and ambition. When infinite joy is offered us like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea, we are far too please.

And so again the problem he's illustrating here is that we tend to focus on surface level particulars rather than following that chain of being moving closer and closer toward the reality of what we most ultimately desire, which I mean ultimately we find in the beatific vision in beholding

the glory of God. And along the same lines he writes here, if a trans temporal, trans finite good is our real destiny, than any other good on which our desire fixes must be in some degree fallacious, must bear at best only a symbolic relation to what will truly satisfy. So again we get this language as pointing us toward shadow reality. Don't focus on the particular, focus on what the particular good represents, and ultimately whatever represents is the good.

And so we want to move upward on the chain of being, not downward. And I love this passage here and which he's going to explicitly mention the morning star, which is another name for Venus. And he writes, and this brings me to the other sense of glory. Glory is brightness, splendor, luminosity. We are to shine as the sun. We are to be given the morning star. And I think I'll begin to see what it means in one way. Of course, God has given us the morning star already.

You can go and enjoy the gift on many fine mornings if you get up early enough. What more you may ask, do we want? Ah? But we want so much more something. The books on esthetics take little notice of, but the poets and the mythologies know all about it. We do not want merely to see beauty, though God knows even that is bounty enough. We want something else,

which can hardly be put into words. To be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it. And a couple things worth pointing out here. First of all, so he talks about the morning star, which is another term for Venus. He talks about the fact that it's beautiful, that it is bright, that it is splendid, and it is all of these things. But it's also worth noting that it's not only Venus who

gets it's the term morning star, it's also Lucifer. And so morning star has this double meaning moving upward in the right direction. The morning star is that which is beautiful, that which beckons our souls towards that which is true, and toward that which is good. This is the positive ideal. However, the corrupted ideal that doesn't move upward but actually moves

us downward is Lucifer. And of course I remember that we're told in scripture that the devil appears as an angel of light, and this is why it makes a lot of sense that this story set place on Venus is going to be just as horrifying as it is beautiful, just as celestial as it is diabolical. And so why we're going to see this contest between that which is good and noble and worth preserving and that which causes

things to become ignoble toward that which causes corruption. And so unite yourself with the true morning Star, and you yourself become beautiful. You become a conduit for beauty. You become the one who embraces beauty and is embraced by beauty. You take it into yourself sacramentally even But what you don't want to do is embrace the counterfeit, that which appears beautiful but actually is not. In fact, I think good way of getting at this is to talk a

little bit about the muses and the sirens. See it's very popular today where if you ask somebody what beauty is, they'll say, well, beauty's in the eye of the beholder is kind of whatever you want it to be. That doesn't hold up for most classical thought, right, you go back to the classical work, and you have a firm difference between beauty and seduction, symbolized by the muses and

the sirens. So the muses where the daughters of Zeus who would inspire truth, goodness and beauty, and the artisans and the poets and whatnot. Beauty being that which directs the soul toward what is true, good, and life giving. Now,

the opposing force to amuse would be the sirens. The sirens are these creatures who live on the islands and cast their apparently beautiful songs across the waters to unsuspecting sailors who hear these songs and get filled with You four, you get filled with visions of fantasy and are drawn back to the sirens. But then they end up crashing their ships on the shore, and then they're consumed by these monsters who only had the appearance of beauty. And

so this symbolizes seduction. It's a counterfeit beauty. It's an appearance of beauty that ultimately leads to not what is true and good and life giving, but that which is false and evil and life consuming. And so this is why it's so important that we cultivate the right affections, that we cultivate a discerning mind. And so when beauty appears to us, we're able to recognize the reality, and

we're also able to recognize the counterfeit. Okay, and then I'm going to go ahead and skip over this passage for now, but I'm going to put this PowerPoint on the course, and so you can take a look at this yourself. But I want to go ahead and move forward to this last slide here. And so we just talked about how we're supposed to embrace beauty. We're supposed

to embrace glory. But ultimately, the path to glory is the path of Christ, and that is the path of the And so meanwhile, the cross comes before the crown, and tomorrow is a Monday morning. A cleft has opened in the pitiless walls of the world, and we are invited to follow our great Captain inside. I'm not even going to comment on this other than to say that as you approach the end sequence of Perilandra, keep these sentences in line, and especially the very specific imagery that's

brought up in this language. But that's all I'm gonna say for now. I will return to that in the next video, and that's going to give you some basic ideas to think about some ideas to keep in mind as you read through Perilandra. But as I said, before you even get in on this reading of it or this rereading of it, I do recommend that you take some time to read the Weight of Glory and just to let these ideas really sink into your mind, sink

into your soul. And I think that's going to set you up to get even more out of Perilandra, which I will dissect a little bit more next time. And until then, godspeed. All right, thank you for listening or watching if you're over on YouTube, and you should know that that if you do listen to podcast, that you can also watch most of these episodes on YouTube. You

can find that link in the show notes. Now, the next thing to come out from Mythic Mind is going to be over on the Mythic Mind Games podcast, as we just recorded a conversation on mass Effect two for the Games podcast, and if if you haven't already done it, make sure you check out the conversation on mass Effect one.

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to get access to. Well, that's it for now. Next time we'll see over on the Game's podcast with Mass Effect two. Until next time, godspeed,