Reconstructing Eden: Paradise Lost and C.S. Lewis’s Perelandra

Abstract

As a religious apologist and author of a classic series of children’s fantasies, C.S. Lewis (1898–1963) has been a household name for more than half a century. His distinguished career as a literary scholar may be less well known to the general public, but in the rarified world of Milton scholarship his name elicits immediate recognition. The Oxford don’s contribution to the mid-century “Milton controversy,” A Preface to “Paradise Lost” (1942), remains one of the most influential modern studies of the poem and a flashpoint for ongoing debates over its form, style, and meaning. Most Milton scholars are aware of Lewis’s wide-ranging works on medieval and Renaissance Iiterature—The Allegory of Love (1936), English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (1954), The Discarded Image (1961), in addition to the Preface—but they may be less well acquainted with the connections between his scholar-ship and other aspects of his career. In fact, at the same time as he drafted his lectures on Paradise Lost, Lewis also prepared the first of his immensely popular radio broadcasts (later published as Mere Christianity) and developed two of his most notable works of theological fiction, The Screwtape Letters (1942) and Perelandra (1943). In the first book, Lewis displays his gift for religious satire in the form of epistles from a senior devil to his nephew, an apprentice tempter who is cutting his teeth on a new Christian convert. In Perelandra, which also dwells on the process of temptation, Lewis turns to the medium of science fiction and reenvisions the Miltonic drama of cosmic warfare between God and Satan on the planet Venus.