When C.S. Lewis combined aliens and Christianity

C.S. Lewis, a pretty cool dude

Longtime readers of this blog--if there are any--know that I am fascinated with aliens. Perhaps less well known is the fact that this fascination extends at least as far back into my life as high school. It was during that time that my high school library, which periodically gives away books it was trying to get rid of, set out for the taking the three volumes of the Space Trilogy, written by C.S. Lewis (better known, of course, for The Chronicles of Narnia and Christian apologetics such as Mere Christianity). I had somehow heard about these books, which are combine aliens and vintage science fiction with Christian theology, before I saw my library trying to give them away. Hardly one to pass up free books anyway, and already interested in the promised synthesis of extraterrestrials and religion, I scooped them up, thinking I would read them at some point if not right then.

And I did--six years later. I may procrastinate, but I eventually get around to the thing I set out to do. In this case, I'm glad I did. All three novels--Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength--were great reads, though Perelandra stands out as the best of three. After reading all of the books, I wrote essays for the Patheos blog "Love Among the Ruins" about each, interpreting them in light of Catholic doctrine (even though Lewis wasn't Catholic, he might as well have been). I started with the first, obviously, which recounts a trip to the planet we know as Mars, but is known in the book as Malacandra. The main character, a Lewis stand-in named Elwin Ransom, finds himself unwittingly dragooned into a sort of imperialist mission by two other characters to conquer Mars in the name of "human progress," but all three human characters find that the inhabitants on Mars have something to teach the human race. As I wrote in my essay on Out of the Silent Planet:

Thus do three humans travel to a world two of them consider benighted, yet where one of them discovers it quite the opposite. Ransom finds that it is, rather, the full flowering of a world that never diverged from the naturally ordained order of its Creator, as the supreme contentment and harmony of its inhabitants bear out. Instead, Earth is the place that needs help, as it is the domain of humans of a wounded nature.

The inhabitants of Malacandra, then, actually point humanity toward a better way to live in relation to our Creator. 

As Lewis followed up Out of the Silent Planet with Perelandra, so I followed up my response to the former with one on the latter. Perelandra once again details a journey by Ransom to another planet. This time, however, he is sent willingly, to a world that is not old, as was Malacandra, but to young, Edenic Perelandra (to us, Venus). There, he confronts an attempt by an all-too-familiar evil to corrupt that world as it once did our own. Though Ransom wonders whether he must save Perelandra at all, or whether such thoughts are instead vain, even blasphemous speculation on his part, he accepts that this is the correct course of action. As I wrote in my essay on Perelandra:

...he realizes that, though God became Man because of sin, this was not the good that God had prepared for man. “That is lost for ever. The first King and first Mother of our world did the forbidden thing; and He brought good of it in the end. But what they did was not good; and what they lost we have not seen.” Though good came of it eventually, and the great good will come of it in the end, it was not God’s original plan for man and deprived him of the graces of his Original State. Thus does Ransom’s agonizing over his mission end; for so long he had wondered: “Had Hell a prerogative to work wonders? Why did Heaven work none?” His conclusion: “He himself was the miracle.” He was sent to Perelandra to answer that greatest of what-ifs, to prevent a recurrence of the Fall on another world.

Ransom's wondering why the Fall happened on Earth and questioning whether it was necessary, then, both enable him in good conscience to go about saving another world from a similar fate, and deepen his own theological understanding of the Fall of Man.

Lewis concludes his trilogy with That Hideous Strength, and I of course concluded my own trilogy with an essay on it. Lewis brings the action back to Earth in this novel. He shows through the actions of the seemingly well-intentioned National Institute of Co-ordinated Experiment (N.I.C.E. [!]) how man utterly divorced from the spiritual and consumed by the material can be just as dangerous as a religious fanatic, if not more so--especially when armed with the latest technology and a completely utilitarian mindset. Standing against the N.I.C.E. is a seemingly meager resistance that draws its strength from a more integrated, organic view of man, one rooted, moreover, in religious precepts. Lewis offers some advice in the novel of significant import to those who despair at the state of the modern world, which I quote in my essay on That Hideous Strength:

We must change the culture, starting by living lives consistent with John Pauline principles, and then spreading outward to the lives of our peers and the character of our institutions by our examples. For while proponents have lost much ground, the divine lingers in the world and its people. Therefore, “[t]he whole work of healing Tellus [another name for Earth] depends on nursing that little spark, on incarnating that ghost, which is still alive in every real people, and different in each…” It is now up to us to put his advice into practice.

Those who want to do something about the state of the world, then, must work outward from the goodness that still lingers in even the most lost and corrupted souls and institutions of our society. (For another take on That Hideous Strength, click here.)

Given the Space Trilogy's thematic depth, fantastic settings, and intriguing characterizations and plotting, I would heartily recommend it to anyone interested in aliens, religion, or both. Give them all a read, and tell me what you think. I hope you take less time to read them than I did.