C.S. Lewis had a fertile imagination. It shines in the Narnia saga, and it burns even brighter in his science fiction. It’s a mystery how writers create these worlds. I just finished Out of the Silent Planet, the opening story in his space trilogy. I read it last 29 years ago as a senior in high school.
Dr. Ransom, a university professor, is abducted and taken on a spaceship to Mars, known to its inhabitants as Malacandra. His adventures there span several months. He lives among the hrossa, rides a sorn and studies the landscape, language and culture. His abductors try to kill him but fail. The story ends after Ransom has an audience with Oyarsa, the spiritual being who rules Malacandra, along with his assistants, the eldila. Oyarsa sends Ransom and the other two home to earth. They arrive after a three month journey and exit the spaceship just before it disintegrates.
As Ransom learns about life on Malacandra, he sees his home planet in a new light. Earth, known on Malacandra as Thulcandra, the Silent Planet, is a bent world. Something about earth is skewed, out of joint, and Ransom sees this clearly as he lives among the inhabitants of Malacandra and notes the harmonious way they live with one another. Earth is characterized by desire and a need for dominance not found on Malacandra. Earth is bent because it is the victim of a spiritual battle it is only dimly aware of.
Lewis the theologian was speaking through his science fiction. The bentness of earth must be his way of conveying the Christian doctrine of original sin, for example. The eldila and Oyarsa stand in for angels, I think. Of course you don’t have to read it in this way — you can simply see it as a fascinating story about a man’s unexpected trip to Mars. It is that too.
The image of sin as bentness intrigues me, though. A bent object does not work in the manner it was designed to. It needs to be straightened to do that. But it cannot straighten itself — an outside influence must assist. So in Christian theology, the image of God in human beings has been distorted through sin, and redemption is the process by which God restores it.
What if you were bent, but you didn’t know it? You mistake your bentness for straightness because you don’t know any other way. A lot of people today do not believe they are bent. They haven’t been on Mars, as Ransom was, to see the difference.
Re: “A bent object does not work in the manner it was designed to.”
It reminds me of Aristotles view of virtue in Nichomachean Ethics.
Re: “…notes the harmonious way they live with one another. Earth is characterized by desire and a need for dominance not found on Malacandra.”
This is who we are. It characterizes all life on earth, not only human life. By the paradigm of evolution through which we understand our origins and ways, we would not exist without this desire.
A few days ago you were writing about evolution and Polkinghorne. I think it is hard to hold the position that we are sinful and at the same time believe in evolution. Redemption goes with the idea of sin and creation, but not with the idea of emergence. Harmony fits the idea that we live, or are intended to live, in a cosmos – a stable order created by God. It does not fit the ecological idea that we are part of a cosmogenesis. In that view harmony is only an illusion.