Paradise Reframed: Lewis, Bergson, and Changing Times on Perelandra

Abstract

Ever since its publication, C. S. Lewis's Perelandra (1943) has been read primarily in terms of a sharply defined struggle between religious and naturalistic points of view. As in the other parts of his Space Trilogy, Lewis seems to present an impassable conflict between Christianity and the post-Darwinian tendencies of modern thought. In the first novel, Out of the Silent Planet (1938), the Christian protagonist, Elwin Ransom, contends with the imperial designs of two ambitious villains--the physicist Weston and the businessman Devine--who take for granted their own evolutionary superiority and regard it as sufficient warrant for the subordination or conquest of others. In Perelandra Ransom again encounters Weston, who has been converted to biological and now promotes the doctrine of or emergent evolution. In this modern reconstruction of John Milton's Paradise Lost, the contest between Ransom and Weston, or rather the Satanic tempter who takes possession of Weston's body, appears to represent the irreconcilable opposition between Christian doctrine and an insidious new philosophy inspired by the revolution in biology. A similar conflict would appear once more in That Hideous Strength (1945), which features Ransom in a mortal struggle with a demonic organization (N.I.C.E.) that pursues a eugenically inspired program to assume control of the evolutionary process. Taken together, these seemingly dear-cut confrontations between Christian tradition and modern apostasy reinforce the image of Lewis as the voice of an endangered heritage--a self-styled dinosaur waging spiritual warfare against the corruption and confusions of his age. (1) Given these clearly defined battle lines, it is surprising to find that some of the most distinctive features of Perelandra's new Eden are derived from the same biological espoused by the enemy. In a dramatic departure from traditional views of the earthly paradise, Lewis presents the prelapsarian order as a state of continuous flux and dynamic development. Instead of an immutable condition that precedes the fall into time and change, Lewis's new Eden is a world of perpetual movement in which the one prohibition--its Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil is to avoid habitation of the Fixed Land. To appreciate the significance of this move, we must take a closer look at the doctrines of and emergent and the functions they served in early twentieth-century culture. The term evolution is associated specifically with the philosopher Henri Bergson, whose Creative Evolution (1907) became one of the most influential books of the period. evolution refers to a subsequent but closely related movement among British thinkers--including the philosopher Samuel Alexander, author of Space, Time and Deity (1920), and the zoologist C. Lloyd Morgan, author of Emergent Evolution (1923)--who modified the Darwinian paradigm to allow more room for novelty, discontinuity, and creative development in the evolutionary process. Lewis often expressed his admiration for certain features of Alexander's work (see note 10), but his mobile paradise seems especially indebted to Bergson's pioneering reformulation of the concept of time, which upset the traditional priority of Being over Becoming and paved the way for emergent and comparable explorations of temporal process by Alfred North Whitehead and others in the 1920s. (2) As we shall see, in his early years Lewis read Bergson with much enthusiasm, and his often favorable remarks even after his midlife conversion to Christianity indicate some of the ways that Perelandra takes up the philosopher's vision of creation as a process of continuous and innovative development. Of course, as the portrayal of Weston clearly indicates, Lewis rejects much of Bergson's philosophy and the intellectual tendencies it represents. …