The book of Revelation is chockfull of violence and warfare. Once issue is how literally take this imagery. At one end of the continuum, a reader may believe events will unfold as described, as if this is film footage of the future.
At the other hand of the spectrum is the view that this is symbolic imagery for a bloodless psychological struggle between good and evil. Spiritual warfare. Fighting for the soul.
There's a gain of truth to that, but there was real warfare in the 1C Roman Empire. Christians suffered physical persecution and martyrdom. And that continues throughout church history.
I remember as a boy reading Perelandra for the first time. I was blown away by the sensuous sceny of the floating islands on the copper seas.
However, I found the fight scene towards the end jarring and unsatisfactory. Ransom is gradually losing the debate with the Un-Man. He isn't necessarily losing the argument. He has truth on his side. But the Uh-Man, as a mouthpiece for Satan, is his intellectual superior. He's been around since creation. He tells the Queen beguiling lies. Incrementally, her resistance weakens.
And that point Ransom gives up on debate and resorts to violence. On the face of it, reading it for the first time, that seems like an artistic co-out. A cheat. As if Lewis took the action in one direction but was unable to resolve it on its own terms, so he abruptly changes course.
But coming back to it years later, there's wisdom in his denouement. Lewis was a WWI vet. And he lived through WWII. He was depressed by the prospect of another war. I once watched an interview with Freeman Dyson describing what it was like to be a college student in England on the eve of the war. The atmosphere was claustrophobic and fatalistic. The English could foresee that the Wehrmacht was coming for them. Coming to their shores. It was unstoppable. So you had to wait for the inevitable. Were you doomed? Was resistance futile?
It's best to resolve conflict through reason, but sometimes people choose evil over reason. They can't be reasoned with. They put themselves beyond the reach of reason. So they can only be defeated through superior force, not superior argument. Having goodness and truth on your side are not enough if that's the very thing evil loathes. Although Revelation uses stock martial imagery, although the imagery is stylized, it may portend real warfare.
When Jesus returns, it will be in glory _and_ power. Many interpreters focus on the former and ignore the latter. Yet, they are not either/or. He will be glorified through his power in the bloody destruction of the wicked. Many think that when he returns it will be some punctiliar event quickly ushering all reality into some amorphous eternal state. However, the interpreter, who has not been influenced by nineteenth century anti-supernatural, German higher criticism, will recognize that the complex-whole, eschatological wrath of God will not only be realized with Christ and his armies defeating the wicked through the trumpet and bowl judgements, but will be culminated in a bloody war with the beast's armies. God could have easily defeated the Egyptians in a punctiliar act of judgment. Instead, he chose to be glorified through the progressive, consecutive acts of judgment of the series of plagues.
ReplyDeleteLikewise, God will be glorified through his power in like manner when Christ returns, but this time, it will be realized on the global stage.
Ransom ponders on this very issue. The answer is that he's defending Tinidril against the un-man. It's a kind of spiritual defense of the innocent. She has said "no" over and over again to the un-man's temptations. By the time Ransom fights him, he's taken to keeping her up late at night talking to her, pushing her, and he doesn't seem to need sleep. She is getting confused and worn down. As Ransom thinks about it, on our own world if Eve had said "no" to the serpent, presumably the serpent would not have been allowed to continue indefinitely using third-degree tactics. God would eventually have put an end to the temptation. The fight between Ransom and the un-man is God's means on Perelandra of putting an end to the temptation, which she has already resisted for some time. That makes sense to me. The un-man himself, of course, at this point is just a demon-possessed vehicle for the devil. There is no reasoning with him. Ransom's presence and arguments may have helped Tinidril somewhat in her resistance to the temptation. But at this point his role is to defend her physically. One aspect of that I liked was his "discovering what hatred was for." He's allowed to hate the devil, and that helps to give him physical strength.
ReplyDeleteGreat post!
ReplyDeleteIn addition, as I recall, the possessed Prof. Weston aka the Un-man is a devotee of neo-Darwinism (or whatever it was called back then). He argues for the inevitability of evolutionary forces pushing humanity to ever greater heights...with a little help from us. He argues for us to conquer our own nature in order to evolve into a species far stronger than Homo sapiens have ever been. He argues for the use of eugenics, psychological conditioning, and so on to reshape others into the image he believes best for humanity. He argues for (as Lewis would put it) the abolition of man as man is in order to form a new man (or really an un-man). In this respect, Ransom violently struggling with the Un-man and defeating him by physical force is poetic justice, I think.