Turning Back To Make Progress

"Progress means not just changing, but changing for the better….We all want progress. But progress means getting nearer to the place where you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turning, then to go forward does not get you any nearer. If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; and in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man." (C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity [New York, New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2021], approximate Kindle locations 355, 533)

God Is No Fonder Of Intellectual Slackers Than Of Any Other Slackers

"[God] wants a child's heart, but a grown-up's head. He wants us to be simple, single-minded, affectionate, and teachable, as good children are; but He also wants every bit of intelligence we have to be alert at its job, and in first-class fighting trim. The fact that you are giving money to a charity does not mean that you need not try to find out whether that charity is a fraud or not. The fact that what you are thinking about is God Himself (for example, when you are praying) does not mean that you can be content with the same babyish ideas which you had when you were a five-year-old. It is, of course, quite true that God will not love you any the less, or have less use for you, if you happen to have been born with a very second-rate brain. He has room for people with very little sense, but He wants every one to use what sense they have. The proper motto is not 'Be good, sweet maid and let who can be clever,' but 'Be good, sweet maid, and don't forget that this involves being as clever as you can.' God is no fonder of intellectual slackers than of any other slackers. If you are thinking of becoming a Christian, I warn you, you are embarking on something which is going to take the whole of you, brains and all." (C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity [New York, New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2021], approximate Kindle location 1057)

The Key To History

"Now God designed the human machine to run on Himself. He Himself is the fuel our spirits were designed to burn, or the food our spirits were designed to feed on. There is no other. That is why it is just no good asking God to make us happy in our own way without bothering about religion. God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing. That is the key to history." (C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity [New York, New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2021], approximate Kindle location 763)

Leave The Bulbs Alone, And The New Flowers Will Come Up

To demand the continual experience of the pleasure is to cut ourselves off from the subsequent pleasure that God intended. This principle - that memory is the capstone of pleasure - is for [C.S.] Lewis one instance of Christ's teaching that a thing will not really live unless it dies, and it has many applications. "On every level of our life - in our religious experience, in our gastronomic, erotic, aesthetic, and social experience - we are always harking back to some occasion which seemed to us to reach perfection, setting that up as a norm, and depreciating all other occasions by comparison." Many Christians look back with longing on the bright days after their conversion or after some great spiritual moment. They lament that those fervent desires have in some measure died away. No doubt sometimes the death of those initial pantings is due to sin. But not always. Lewis suggests that God intends those intense passions to pass away. They were the explosion that started the engine of the Christian life. But man does not live on explosions alone….

In addition, God has built us so that we can't keep these explosions going. Our bodies will not suffer the intensity of thrills for long. Lewis calls this the law of undulation (a fancy word for a wave-like rhythm)….Undulation is the natural, bodily way that God regulates our desires. Self-denial is the supernatural way that we join God in ordering our loves. As fallen humans, we're sorely tempted to ignore undulation and seek to get maximum and repeated joy out of the same pleasures. Self-denial is our resistance to this temptation, not because we wish to hinder our joy, but because we believe that God wishes to give us additional joys.

[quoting Lewis] "It is simply no good trying to keep any thrill: that is the very worst thing you can do. Let the thrill go - let it die away - go on through that period of death into the quieter interest and happiness that follow - and you will find you are living in a world of new thrills all the time. But if you decide to make thrills your regular diet and try to prolong them artificially, they will all get weaker and weaker, and fewer and fewer, and you will be a bored, disillusioned old man for the rest of your life."

Instead of being tormented by the lost golden moments of our past, Lewis encourages us to accept them as memories. When we do, we find that they are entirely wholesome, nourishing, and enchanting. "Properly bedded down in a past which we do not miserably try to conjure back, they will send up exquisite growths. Leave the bulbs alone, and the new flowers will come up. Grub them up and hope, by fondling and sniffing, to get last year's blooms, and you will get nothing." The past joy is to die if it is to live.

(Joe Rigney, Lewis On The Christian Life [Wheaton, Illinois: Crossway, 2018], 159-60)

Loving God More Than Others Improves Our Love For Others

Here's a good collection of quotes from C.S. Lewis on the subject. It's something that ought to be discussed more.

Jesus seminar renders Lewis' trilemma obsolete! And other tall tales

Esther O'Reilly:

Reminded today of just how awful this William Lane Craig quote from Reasonable Faith is [near the end of chapter 7]:

Often one hears people say, 'I don’t understand all those philosophical arguments for God’s existence and so forth. I prefer historical apologetics.' I suspect that those who say this think that historical apologetics is easy and will enable them to avoid the hard thinking involved in the philosophical arguments. But this section ought to teach us clearly that this is not so. It is naïve and outdated simply to trot out the dilemma 'Liar, Lunatic, or Lord' and adduce several proof texts where Jesus claims to be the Son of God, the Messiah, and so forth. The publicity generated by the Jesus Seminar and The DaVinci Code has rendered that approach forever obsolete. Rather, if an apologetic based on the claims of Christ is to work, we must do the requisite spadework of sorting out those claims of Jesus that can be established as authentic, and then drawing out their implications. This will involve not only mastering Greek but also the methods of modern criticism and the criteria of authenticity. Far from being easy, historical apologetics, if done right, is every bit as difficult as philosophical apologetics. The only reason most people think historical apologetics to be easier is because they do it superficially.

How awful is this passage? Let me count the ways:

1. The Jesus Seminar renders Lewis obsolete? I'll let the self-defeating irony of this particular bit speak for itself.
2. Are we doing sociology or epistemology here? Genuinely can't tell.
3. Is there reasonable doubt that Jesus *did* make such explicit claims to deity as those we find in, say, John? If not, why not use them? Yet, significantly, Craig never does.
4. Why the need for all this "spadework" if we can establish whole-gospel reliability?
5. Yet further irony: In the intro to RF, Craig downplays "saddling" oneself with establishing whole-gospel reliability, then here proceeds to "saddle" his readers with all this "spadework" as...an improvement?
6. "This requires mastering Greek." So much for the "one-dollar apologist," eh?

I'm sorry to say it, but this really is the sort of rhetoric that gives big apologetics a bad name. Massively unhelpful, confusing, and does not reflect the actual state of the argument.

Yes, we really need to get out of this rigid rut where first you need to establish X, Y and Z arguments for general theism, and only then can you "move on" to the historical arguments. Says who? Written where?

Till We Have Faces

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Uk-ukf7iaA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCipem2XoG4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMffwQPp2FM&t=1s

Many critics deem this to be Lewis's best novel. It isn't fair to judge a book I haven't read, but at the same time there's a reason I never read it. Watching the lecture is a nice of a cheating. Giving me insight as a substitute for reading the book. I think a lot of Lewis fans haven't read it because:

i) It isn't Christian. It's a reversion to Lewis's lifelong fascination with Greek mythology. So the pagan setting is off-putting, and unlike the Greco-pagan elements in The Chronicles of Narnia, this isn't diluted.

ii) The main characters are women, it's written from a female perspective (insofar as Lewis can get inside a woman's mind), and it seems to have a female slant in terms of all the psychologizing and relational dynamics. This may reflect the influence of his wife reading the drafts. He's not merely adopting a feminine voice or viewing but taking his clues from her critical feedback. 

That's less appealing to the stereotypical male reader than some of his other fiction, with their more externalized focus on exploration and exotic landscape. 

iii) Whether or not I read a fictional book depends on a snap judgment from reading a plot synopsis. If the plot doesn't interest me I don't read the book. Same thing with movies and TV dramas. 

The Silver Chair

This may have been my least favorite of the Narnia stories, but Dr. Masson provides a lot of useful background and analysis which shows the unsuspected depth of the storytelling, including the lunar symbolism and Odyssean motifs:

And yet, and yet...

Greg Koukl:

I was reading the L.A. Times today in the letters to the editor section and there was a letter written by a gentleman in Newport Beach that was a response to a tragic story that the Times had carried a few days ago. Maybe some of you had seen that story or have read about it in the local papers about not just the rank and file tragedy in Bosnia-Hertzegovena, not about the general tragedy of war. The article was about the problems of the refugees and also a women being victimized by soldiers.

This respondent writes, "Glancing at your April 10 paper my eyes fell upon the tragic story 'Ordeals Put Off Bosnia Rape Victim's Healing.' My heart ached for Amira, the 35 year old Muslim woman, mother of two children, suffering the loss of her husband, wandering about the countryside begging to survive. Placed in a detention camp, raped repeatedly by Serb soldiers acting as animal pigs rather than humans, the woman became another tragic victim of human wickedness. Where is mankind headed? My thoughts turn to God and ask, 'Why, God? Why did you create such monsters? God, are you for real?' If this is God's way of teaching or testing my faith", he continues, " then my beliefs and faith are being shattered with contempt instead. Having just lost my wife to cancer, maybe my feelings are more prone and fragile to be torn apart and my feelings turn more intensely to those who are suffering also." It's signed Victor Jashinski in Newport Beach.

The Last Battle

Philip Pullman: siding with Satan

https://michaelnazirali.com/articles/app/archive/10-2019/title/philip-pullman-siding-with-satan

The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe

Noble pagans

This is a follow-up to my previous post:

Scott

I have always wondered about that part [about Emeth worshiping Tash as Aslan in C. S. Lewis' The Last Battle], but not yet taken the time to look it up. Does Aslan's quote about "Those who follow Tash but do good actually follow me / and vice versa" accurately reflect CS Lewis' view on the matter?

Thanks, Scott. That's a good question!

1. I'm no C. S. Lewis scholar, but to my knowledge I think Lewis may have been hopeful that some non-Christians could've been saved (e.g. Virgil). That is, my impression is Lewis had some inclinations toward inclusivism, but I don't know if he was an inclusivist. He certainly wasn't a universalist. Maybe others who know better than I do can weigh in.

2. Regarding inclusivism, the Catholic philosopher Eleonore Stump offers such an argument here. She even cites Lewis' illustration of Emeth worshiping Tash in The Last Battle. It seems to me Stump's basic argument is we're not saved by facts about a person, we're saved by a person, namely Jesus Christ, but it's possible to know a person without knowing who they are. It's possible for a person who doesn't profess to be a Christian to know and love God despite not knowing God's true identity in this life.

3. On the face of it, it sounds like a reasonable argument, which it is to a degree, but I'm afraid I don't think it works at the end of the day.

a. For one thing, there's a significant difference between loving a person and loving an idea. If we can love God by loving that which God stands for (e.g. goodness, beauty), despite not knowing which (if any) God we're loving, then it seems to me what we're really loving is abstractions or ideas. If a pagan loves an impersonal goodness like a Platonic form of goodness, or if an atheist loves beauty in nature, how would that be loving a God who is personal? That could just as well be loving the creation rather than the creator. So I think there'd still need to be a step from loving true goodness to loving God.

b. With regard to the core claims of Christianity, I don't see how philosophical or theological truths can be so detached from historical facts or foundations. After all, Christianity is a historically revealed religion (e.g. 1 Cor 15). God plants his footsteps in the sea. God works wonders for his people. God speaks to his people via his prophets. God sends his Son. All this needs to be taken into consideration. It can't be ignored or glossed over.

Otherwise, if loving goodness or beauty in the abstract is sufficient for salvation, then all who seek goodness or beauty could be scaling up a different slope of the mountain, but all will reach the same destination in the end. A villager from Africa with no knowledge of Christianity could be seeking goodness. Likewise a Native American. Same with an Australian Aborigine. All in the context of their own culture's spiritual beliefs and practices. And so on. In fact, isn't this in effect what Hinduism teaches? If so, then perhaps Hinduism is the true religion, not Christianity. Perhaps Yahweh is another name for Brahman, not the other way around.

c. Moreover, how would the non-Christian know what is true goodness and true beauty? How far can natural revelation alone take the non-Christian in knowing what is truly good? For instance, isn't there a non-trivial distinction between the regenerate person's conscience and the unregenerate person's conscience? More to the point, our consciences may indeed give us moral insight, but what's needed isn't solely moral insight, but personal repentance.

d. I suspect Stump has in the back of her mind the noble pagan who has never heard the gospel but apparently lives an exemplary life and searches for truth, goodness, and beauty. Such as the ancient Greek philosophers Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. As far as that goes, I don't know if men like these were so morally exemplary, certainly not by 21st century progressive values (e.g. their arguments regarding slavery, their arguments about how society should be constituted). Furthermore, many of the ancient Greeks and Romans cultivated the life of the mind, perhaps we could add some of the ancient Egyptians, Indians, and Chinese, but otherwise how common was "the search for goodness, truth, and beauty" throughout human history? At any rate, I think Stump's argument might make more headway given some versions of freewill theism, but Calvinists would have better answers to the question, in my view, which Triablogue members have responded to in the past.

e. In addition, there are plenty of non-Christians who aren't "noble pagans" but are in fact explicitly serving a god that's inconsistent with true goodness as Stump envisions true goodness. Take Muslims who love Allah. Take, for instance, that to be a good Muslim one evidently needs to treat Jews and Christians as second-class citizens in Muslim lands and one must execute non-Muslims who refuse to become Muslims. If the Muslim does that, then they might be a good Muslim, but they're not doing what's truly good and right because they're mistreating others, according to Stump's exemplar of true goodness. However, if a Muslim does treat non-Muslims much better than they deserve, then they're not being a good Muslim, and it's arguable they may not even be considered a true Muslim by Islamic tradition. In other words, it seems to me on Stump's argument these Muslims could only be saved if they're more like noble pagans than they are like Muslims. So this seems like a quandary.

Interplanetary politics

1. From what I've read, Perelandra is the most popular entry in the Space Triology, although a few connoisseurs (e.g. Rowan Williams) prefer That Hideous Strength. Perlandra's my personal favorite in the Space Trilogy. 

Perelandra was initially Lewis's favorite until he wrote Til We Have Faces. Some literary critics agree that that's his best novel, but that may be because they think they're supposed to admire it and rank it higher than the others. For a couple of reasons, I think it's possible that Lewis himself overrated Til We have Faces. The myth of Cupid and Psyche had captivated him since he read it for the first time in 1916, when he was still a teenager. But there were many false starts. He tried to do a poetic version. He struggled with how to retell the myth for almost 40 years. His own worldview as well as the interpretation evolved over time. Cf. Peter Schakel's chapter (20) in The Cambridge Companion to C. S. Lewis.

In addition, the breakthrough moment came when he talked it over with his future wife:

Jack has started a new fantasy–for grownups. His methods of work amaze me. One night he was lamenting that he couldn't get a good idea for a book. We kicked a few ideas around till one came to life. Then we had another whiskey each and bounced it back and forth between us. The next day, without further planning, he wrote the first chapter! I read it and made some criticisms…he did it over and went on with the next. D. King, ed. Out of My Bone: The Letters of Joy Davidman (Eerdmans 2009), 242.

So he may have associated the book with his wife, which lends it a special poignancy for him.

2. Because for most readers, myself included, That Hideous Strength is a letdown after Perelandra, it raises the question of how or whether it could be better written. Another question is whether he should have ended with Perelandra. What do you do for an encore? If the final installment can't equal, must less surpass, the second entry, would it be wiser for Lewis to quit while he was ahead rather than end with an anticlimactic climax?

In fairness, it's not a bad book. It has some memorable scenes. Strokes of genius. It's prophetic. But it's not all of a piece. 

3. As every commentator explains, That Hideous Strength marks an abrupt stylistic shift from the first two installments, due in part to the newer influence of Charles Williams and spent impact of Tolkien. Tolkien was no longer a creative stimulus for Lewis, in part because Lewis had outgrown Tolkien, who was a smaller talent, and due to irreconcilable artistic visions.    

But over and above that, a change was inevitable. At a scenic level, That Hideous Strength can't compete with the extraterrestrial landscapes and seascapes of Venus and Mars, or their species. That's exacerbated by the fact that Lewis makes no pretense of astronomical accuracy. They exist in his cosmological mythos. That frees him to indulge in surreal flights of fancy unconstrained by what's physically possible. By contrast, That Hideous Strength must have a more realistic setting. After all, his readers are earthlings. 

4. One of the tensions in Out of the Silent Planet is Lewis attacking secular science and its counterpart in hard science fiction. In particular, the materialist notion that outer space is mostly deserted and dead. But as a matter of fact, that's the case. And even though Lewis didn't have the benefit contemporary astronomy, c. 2020, he must have known back in the 1930s that there was no presumption of other life in our solar system. 

Of course, this is soft SF, not meant to be accurate, but then, what does his critique amount to in that respect? It works at the level of his fictional cosmology, but it's not a refutation of the hard SF view of the universe as mostly deserted and dead. 

However, that's offset by the fact that soft SF is never obsolete, whereas the danger of futuristic hard SF is to become dated when overtaken by real events. It works if you have a dualistic view of reality, where there are spiritual agents behind the physical realm, who participate in the physical realm. Interaction between two different domains. Sacramental universe. 

5. Despite the comedown, there is some justification in the third and final installment. All three share the common theme of a primordial angelic rebellion. Against his will, Ransom is drawn into the internal affairs of Mars. Then he is summoned to Venus. The Martian guardian angel visits earth to facilitate the trip. 

In terms of dramatic logic and closure, it makes sense that events come to a head on earth. Having decisively intervened on Venus, it's only fair that heavenly angels lend Ransom a hand for a critical battle with the dark side on earth. Especially since earth is the epicenter of the cosmic rebellion. That rounds out the dramatic arc of a story that began with Mars and proceeded through Venus. 

6. In addition, it gives Lewis a pretext to reinterpret the King Arthur mythos–a theme many English poets and novelists find irresistible. Merlin fits into Lewis's philosophy of myth and magic. However, making Ransom a descendent of King Arthur is ad hoc. King Arthur has no useful role to play in a 20C setting. He's timebound in a way that Merlin is not. 

Liar, lunatic, or Lord?

1. In Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis popularized a now-famous Christian argument in the form of a trilemma: Jesus was either a liar, a lunatic, or the Lord. This trilemma goes back to a 19C Scotsman. 

I never took the trilemma seriously because it takes the accuracy of the Gospels for granted. Given the accuracy of the Gospels, it's a good argument, but given the accuracy of the Gospels, the argument is superfluous. If the Gospels are accurate, then we can dispense with the trilemma.

2. However, that objection is a tad shortsighted. For it pushes the issue back a step: if Jesus was a deceiver or self-deceived, would we have the Gospels? Would we have any Gospels? Would we have four 1C Gospels? Would we have them as written? Or, at best, would we have very different accounts of Jesus than what we find in the canonical Gospels? 

Either they were written by authors who knew Jesus or who authors who knew folks who knew him–or else they are fictional or legendary tales written by authors with no reliable information. 

If they were written by authors with reliable sources, and Jesus was in fact a deceiver or self-deceived, then the Gospels have him making supernatural claims he can't pull off. A liar or lunatic can't perform most of the miracles attributed to Jesus in the Gospels. 

So on that view, the authors was in a position to know Jesus was a liar or lunatic. But in that event, what's his incentive to write about Jesus as if he was what he claimed to be? 

Writing books promoting the Christian movement was not a career booster in the 1C. It was a public invitation to be ostracized, dispossessed, imprisoned, tortured, and martyred. 

Suppose the Gospels were written by authors who had no reliable information about Jesus. It's just hagiographic legend and pious fiction. But once again, what does the author get out of that exercise? It's not a ticket to success. It doesn't make him rich and popular. 72 virgins aren't waiting for his attention. To the contrary, he's asking for persecution–despite the fact that the Jesus of story isn't worth suffering for. 

What kind of Jesus must stand behind the Gospels to explain their existence, as they stand? That's a deeper question. 

Defeating evil

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. 

The potter and the clay

But who are you, O man, to answer back to God? Will what is molded say to its molder, "Why have you made me like this?" (Rom 9:20)

Some poorly formed musings on a few separable topics which (hopefully) become more closely tied together at the end:

I think a fundamental issue at stake in the debate over LGBTQ issues is whether humans have a nature. Specifically a male and female nature. Is there some fixed core essential(s) that makes us human? Is there some fixed core essential(s) that makes us male and female? Or is human nature malleable or changeable?

If, let us say, atheism and neo-Darwinism are true, then it appears we have no fundamental human nature. Indeed, it appears neither does any other animal. Rather it would seem all living things are on a single ever-evolving spectrum of life.

Take whales and hippos. These are considered by neo-Darwinists to be close living relatives to one another. Yet they appear to be starkly different from one another. How can there be a fundamental whale nature or a fundamental hippo nature in such disparate animals which evolved from a common ancestor, which in turn evolved from another common ancestor, and so on?

Indeed, if we push it back far enough, all life on this planet shares a universal common ancestor. How could each organism's nature be fundamental to the organism when life presumably originated in a single kind of organism? Is the whole panoply of life of the same kind, only differing by degrees? Or is it different kinds - which, if so, how do different kinds differ at a fundamental level when they all originated from a universal common ancestor?

In addition, how could a fundamental nature exist before its corpus existed? We humans didn't exist at the beginning of life on Earth, according to neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory. So how could our natures have existed at this point in time?

Rather it would seem more likely there is no fixed point in terms of a whale or hippo or any other creature's fundamental nature. An organism's fundamental nature itself seems subject to evolutionary forces.

If it's true, though, that humans have no fundamental nature, then it would seem anything goes. Males and females may as well be interchangeable. Transgenderism wins.

In general, many if not most homosexuals oppose this, because they believe we have a fixed or fundamental nature, but a non-fixed sexual orientation. The former is immutable, but the latter is mutable. However, if the homosexual accepts atheism and neo-Darwinism, then on what basis would they argue we have fundamental male and female natures?

What's more, if we have no fundamental human nature, then why can't we mold humans into whatever we wish? Why shouldn't we mold humans into whatever we wish? Indeed, in atheistic totalitarian regimes, that's precisely what they do to their citizens. The state decides what people will be. The clay has become its own potter; the molded its own molder.

The Wonderful Visit

1. Temptation and the Fall are recurrent themes in the fiction of C. S. Lewis. Demonic temptation is a pervasive theme in The Screwtape Letters. Satanic Temptation and a Fall averted is a pervasive theme of Perelandra. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe narrates the temptation, downfall, and redemption of Edmund. The Voyage of the Dawn Treader narrates the temptation, downfall, and redemption of Eustace. In The Magicians Nephew, Lewis synchronizes creation with The fall when Jadis invades Narnia at the moment of creation. The same novel narrates the temptation of Digory in an Edenic/Hesperidian garden, only he successfully resists the temptation. For whatever reason, Lewis seems to be fascinated with these themes. 

2. There's a related, potential theme in Out of the Silent Planet, only Lewis doesn't develop it in that direction. Mars underwent Satanic attack which left it physically damaged, but the three intelligent species remain unfallen. Ransom, a fallen agent, is interjected into that world. That generates contact between unfallen agents and a fallen agent. Yet Ransom, though fallen agent, is benign. He's not a malevolent agent like Jadis, or the Un-man in Perelandra. 

Even so, this raises an interesting idea, although it's not developed in the novel. Although Ransom has no malicious intentions, yet because he is fallen, he can inadvertently seed the unfallen species with evil notions. He's not wicked, but he's like a soldier fresh from the war zone, where you have to watch your back all the time. The kind of precautions and suspicions necessary to survive in a fallen world are foreign to the agents of an unfallen world. Simply by talking about his own experience, by comparing and contrasting his world with the their world, he can unwittingly plant sinister ideas in their imagination that never occurred to them. Like a species with no resistance, much less immunity, to exotic diseases, a well-meaning fallen agent might infect unfallen agents. His presence could prove contagious even though he's not a tempter. That's assuming the aliens, while sinless, are not impeccable.  

3. However, we can also develop the same idea in reverse: the effect of interjecting an unfallen agent into a fallen world. What would be the reaction? John Ruskin once remarked that if an angel was spotted in England, he'd be shot on sight. That prompted H. G. Wells to write The Wonderful Visit. Since Wells was an atheist, and the novel is social satire, the protagonist is not a conventional angel by orthodox standards. Rather, he represents a truly innocent, guileless being. He has no understanding of humans and they have no understanding of him. He provokes hostility by compassionate but clueless actions like freeing farm animals. Eventually, he returns to wherever he came from because his presence is intolerable. 

Although that's fictional, it has realistic analogies. Take the persecution of Christians. The virtuous are hated in a world where the normal is vice. The supreme example is the homicidal hostility to Jesus. Darkness fears and despises the light. 

The Magician's Nephew

Portal between two worlds

We have this as a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul, a hope that enters into the inner place behind the curtain (Heb 6:19).

In science fiction, there are two kinds of portals: portals from one time to another and portals from one place to another. The first concerns time travel from past to future or future to past while the second concerns multiverse travel from one parallel universe to another.

On a related note, The Magician's Nephew was the last book Lewis wrote in the Narnia series. It provides a backstory for Narnia. One particular example is how it provides a backstory for the magic wardrobe. The wardrobe is made of apple wood that originates in Narnia. The unstated principle is that the wardrobe is a portal between Narnia and our world because it exists in our world but it originates in Narnia. So it's connected to both worlds. 

These are fictional examples. Heb 6:19 illustrates the same basic principle, only this is factual. The souls of living Christians exist in this world, but are connected to heaven or the world to come by an anchor chain. Like a lifeline, where one end is wrapped around the waist of the Christian while Jesus is holding the other end from heaven and reeling it in. Jesus connects us to heaven and pulls us through because he came from heaven and returned to heaven.