Spoiler alert: This post is part of an in-depth discussion of Perelandra by C. S. Lewis, which will inevitably reveal key plot points. Unless you're the sort of person who likes skipping to the last page, go read the book first.
To prevent another Fall on Perelandra, Maleldil instructed Ransom to kill the body of Weston, who became possessed by an evil spiritual Force and attempted to introduce evil to the green Queen of Perelandra. Maleldil put all the living creatures of Perelandra into a deep sleep, and after his own night's sleep that left him refreshed and spiritually renewed, Ransom confronted the Un-Man, beginning hand-to-hand combat, presumably to the death, between them. Ransom relied on his boxing skills while the feral Un-Man preferred to claw at Ransom's skin. After a time Weston escaped and rode out to the sea on one of the giant fish that the Perelandrians use for transportation; Ransom mounted another fish and pursued him.
In this chapter, the sea chase continues, with Ransom realizing just how far his pursuit of the Un-Man has taken him from anything like solid ground. He's out in the middle of the sea with no land or floating islands in sight. He spies some mer-men and tries to eat some of the seaweed they are eating, but the seaweed affects his mind, making him feel disoriented and forgetful of his mission; he throws the rest of it away. After a day and night of his fight with, and pursuit of, Weston, he is beginning to have doubts about his mission and the goodness of Maleldil.
In time he is approached by
Weston on his fish, and it indeed appears to be Weston, as if he has
regained control of his body from the Force. Weston is confused and
terrified: that he is trapped on Perelandra, and that Ransom might
abandon him. Having been possessed by a devil, he has had a foretaste
of death; that, too, terrifies him. As the darkness closes in on them,
Ransom tells Weston to stop talking nonsense and to pray to repent of
his sins. But he is lifted off his fish and dragged under the sea.
This chapter begins, "Darkness fell upon the waves as suddenly as if it had been poured out of a bottle." It's a nice turn of phrase, and it suggests either that Ransom is somewhere near Perelandra's equator, or that it has a short day. As I noted earlier in the book, Lewis's depiction of Venus reflects the best science of his day, apart from the fantasy elements. There was still a question about the length of the Venerean day, whether it was short or long. Lewis seems to imply that the day is something like a terrestrial day, at least insofar as Ransom seems to have no trouble adjusting to it. Of course, today we know that Venus's solar day is very long, equivalent to 116 terrestrial days.
It's unclear to Ransom (and to us) whether the mer-men are intelligent. They are like men, but also, in his perception, like animals. Perhaps someday they will be intelligent but, for now, Maleldil hasn't put the spark of rationality in them. Lewis briefly introduces mer-men in the Chronicles of Narnia, though in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, the Sea People are both intelligent and civilized, and apparently fearful or hostile to the Narnians, rather than indifferent.
The seaweed Ransom eats affects his perception and memory, which is why he throws it away. Is it a psychotropic, like cannabis? Or is it more "magical"? Under its influence he sees the ocean surface as the top of the world, and the floating islands like clouds, inaccessible. In other words, the seaweed gives him the mer-men's view of the world. In Perelandra, as in Narnia, the world of mer-men has nothing to do with the world of humans.
Sitting on his fish in the middle of the Perelandrian ocean, Ransom has a crisis of faith. He realizes he is but a speck on a vast ocean the size of a planet. How could this world have been made for the King and Queen, when most of it was uninhabitable by them? The planet itself was also but a speck in the vastness of space. And where, then, was Maleldil?
This is what is known as the argument from scale: in the grand vastness of the cosmos, humanity is an insignificant atom of no importance. It's actually a very old argument that's been discussed for centuries. Lewis himself frequently cited Ptolemy's second-century astronomy text, Almagest, as proof that the ancients knew Earth was infinitesimal compared to the whole of space. But he did not understand why it only recently had become an atheistic argument against Christianity.1 But the argument from scale had been used by notable intellectuals such as H. G. Wells, J. B. S. Haldane, and Arthur Stanley Eddington, the very people whose philosophies Lewis was critiquing in the Space Trilogy.
Blaise Pascal famously said, "The eternal silence of these infinite spaces fills me with dread."2 But Pascal saw man as occupying the middle ground between Nothing and the Infinite. We are an atom to the whole of the universe, but something very small—a dust mite, say—is that in relation to us. We believe ourselves more capable of comprehending the small things, being bigger than them; but, in fact, "in either case it takes an infinite capacity.… These extremes touch and join by going in opposite directions, and they meet in God and God alone."3 The vastness of space ought to drive us to contemplate God's greatness rather than our own irrelevance. "I do not see how we could have come to know the greatness of God," writes Lewis, "without that hint furnished by the greatness of the material universe."4
Lewis writes, "the whole argument from size rests on the assumption that differences of size ought to coincide with differences of value."5 But he concludes that this is "an affair, not of reason but of emotion—of that peculiar emotion which superiorities in size produce only after a certain point of absolute size has been reached.6 That is, a small man is not morally insignificant compared to a large man, so we shouldn't assume that, faced with the vastness of creation, we are of no significance, either.
Ransom, too, has a sense of this, as we could guess:
Part of him still knew that the size of a thing is its least important characteristic, that the material universe derived from the comparing and mythopœc power within him that very majesty before which he was now asked to debase himself.
The Anglican newspaper, the Guardian (no relation to The Guardian), published "Dogma and the Universe" in two parts in March 1943, less than a month before Perelandra was published. I think it's possible that Lewis was developing both works at the same time, using the arguments of the one as plot points in the other.
In the first chapter, the fictional narrator-Lewis was beset by some sort of unease or fear that tempted him to turn back on his walk to Ransom's cottage. It may have been due to the influence of some malevolent spirits. Who is to say that Ransom's doubts, as he floats on the back of a fish in the endless Venerian ocean, are not similarly influenced now by the same bent eldila?
Weston, too, is terrified of the abyss. As a materialist scientist he had had no use for an afterlife. As a pantheistic believer in emergent evolution, he had an optimistic view of death in which one's consciousness was absorbed into the Cosmic Force. But now he knows his Force is a real evil spirit, who had pushed his own consciousness aside it used his body. He has seen the real horror of death: a prison in which the souls of the dead are packed, retaining a bare minimum of consciousness to feel their own decay, miserable, isolated from God and from all hope. He is horrified.
The thought of death puts Weston in a state of terror: terrified of the darkness, of the waves, of the thought of being abandoned by Ransom or marooned on Perelandra, even though right now he is perfectly safe from danger. Meanwhile, on Earth, Ransom tells him, hundreds of boys face death this very moment in the war. Weston sees death as a horror to be avoided; Ransom sees it as an inevitability to be prepared for. Weston needs perspective, and repentance.
Is this the real Weston? Lewis doesn't specifically say, and Ransom seems to have his doubts. Perhaps it's another trick of the Un-Man. Maybe it's the genuine personality of Weston, permitted to resurface by the evil Force to give Ransom a false sense of security. Either way, Weston drags Ransom into the water, and the battle between them continues in chapter 14.
Footnotes
1. C. S. Lewis, "Dogma and the Universe," in God in the Dock (1970, repr. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), 39.
2. Blaise Pascal, Pensées, trans. A. J. Krailsheimer (London: Penguin, 1995), no. 201 (Brunschvicg 206).
3. Pascal, Pensées, no. 199 (Brunschvicg 72).
4. Lewis, "Dogma and the Universe", 42.
5. Lewis, "Dogma and the Universe," 40.
6. Lewis, "Dogma and the Universe," 41.
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