Restoring Beauty E-Book

Louis Markos

• Herausgeber: IVP
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 339

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

More and more in our modern and postmodern culture the twin concepts of beauty and truth have been separated both from each other and from their individual connection to the divine source of Beauty and Truth. Even as our public schools move further and further away from their connection to the universal moral code, the world of art (both high and low) embraces an aesthetic that privileges ugliness over beauty, nihilism over form, and radical self-expression over the pursuit of higher truth. As both an effective apologist for truth-based education and as a sub-creator of his own beauty-enhancing fiction, C.S. Lewis is the ideal guide for those who would seek to restore truth and beauty to their proper place and role in our modern world. Sections one and two analyze Lewis' eleven novels, showing how Lewis counters the growing cult of the ugly and helps restore a clearer understanding of the nature of good and evil. Sections three and four turn to Lewis' non-fiction works to assess what advice Lewis can give educators at all levels who would steer their students away from chronological snobbery and values-free education toward a true re-engagement with the past. The book concludes with a commentary on Screwtape Letters that exposes what Satan's main temptation tactics have been since the 1960s and a detailed bibliographical essay of books by and about Lewis.

Leseprobe

RESTORING BEAUTY:

THE GOOD, THE TRUE, AND THE BEAUTIFUL

IN THE WRITINGS OF C.S. LEWIS

LOUIS MARKOS

InterVarsity Press P.O. Box 1400 Downers Grove, IL 60515-1426 World Wide Web: www.ivpress.com E-mail: [email protected]

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from InterVarsity Press.

InterVarsity Press® is the book-publishing division of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship/USA®, a movement of students and faculty active on campus at hundreds of universities, colleges and schools of nursing in the United States of America, and a member movement of the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students. For information about local and regional activities, write Public Relations Dept. InterVarsity Christian Fellowship/USA, 6400 Schroeder Rd., P.O. Box 7895, Madison, WI 53707-7895, or visit the IVCF website at www.intervarsity.org.

ISBN: 978-0-8308-5938-2

Copyright © 2010 by Louis A. Markos

Extracts by C. S. Lewis copyright © C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. Reprinted by permission.

All Scripture quotations are taken from the King James Version. Public domain.

This book is dedicated to

Stan Mattson

and

the C. S. Lewis Foundation

for advancing the renewal

of Christian thought and creative expression

in the spirit of C. S. Lewis

CONTENTS

Preface

Part I: Restoring Beauty

Chapter 1: Fractured Fairy Tales and the Cult of the Ugly

Chapter 2: The Space Trilogy I: The Beauty of Hierarchy

Chapter 3: The Space Trilogy II: The Beauty of the Normal

Chapter 4: Narnia I: The Beauty of Complementarity

Chapter 5: Narnia II: The Beauty of Clarity

Chapter 6: Narnia III: The Beauty of Light and Truth

Chapter 7: Till We Have Faces: The Beauty of Beauty

Part II: The Good Guys And The Bad Guys

Chapter 8: The Nature of Good and Evil

Chapter 9: Further Up and Further Down

Chapter 10: Heroes and Villains

Chapter 11: Courage along the Road

Chapter 12: The Heirs of Nietzsche

Part III: Men Without Chests

Chapter 13: Losing the Tao

Chapter 14: The Dangers of a Values-Free Education

Chapter 15: From Tao-less Students to Tao-less Citizens

Chapter 16: The Scientist and the Magician

Chapter 17: The Chest-less Tyrant

Chapter 18: The Death of Language

Part IV: Aslan In The Academy

Chapter 19: Restoring the Past

Chapter 20: The Renaissance Never Happened

Chapter 21: Dinosaurs in the Classroom

Chapter 22: Genial Criticism

Chapter 23: The Historical Point of View

Chapter 24: The Professor as Public Educator

PREFACE

In the closing lines of his poem “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” John Keats makes the memorable, if somewhat enigmatic, claim that “beauty is truth, truth beauty.” These five words, when filtered through the life and legacy of C. S. Lewis, provide the impetus and raison d’être for this book. More and more in our modern and postmodern culture these two concepts (beauty and truth) have been separated both from each other and from their individual connection to a divine source of Beauty and Truth: a separation that is perhaps most evident in the twin realms of education and the arts. Even as our public schools move further and further away from their connection to the universal moral code (what Lewis dubbed the Tao), the world of art (whether “high” or “low”) embraces an aesthetic that privileges ugliness over beauty, nihilism over form, and radical self-expression over the pursuit of higher truth. As an effective apologist for and a practitioner of truth-based education and as a creator (or, better, a subcreator, to use J. R. R. Tolkien’s more accurate term) of his own beauty-enhancing fiction, Lewis is the ideal guide for all those who would seek to restore truth and beauty to their proper place and role in our modern world.

Accordingly, in the four sections that make up this book, I will attempt (with Lewis as my guide) to construct a countervision to the prevailing mood of ugliness and relativism that has so gripped our culture. The first two sections will focus on the arts and will use Lewis’s eleven novels as a key to unlock the mysteries of goodness, beauty, and truth that our age has either ignored or deconstructed. I intend the first section to be broader and more theoretical, both in its survey of the problem and in the tentative solutions it offers. The second section is more practical and offers advice to parents on how they might use a family reading of The Chronicles of Narnia to instill in their children a richer, more traditional understanding of good and evil, virtue and vice.

Sections III and IV will shift the focus to the world of education, with the former considering the impact of relativism on children in kindergarten through high school and the latter carrying the critique into the ivied halls of academia. In these sections, I will be guided by Lewis’s apologetical and academic works rather than by his fiction. I conclude with an epilogue in which I present my own updating of Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters and “Screwtape Proposes a Toast.” It will come, I hope, as no surprise that Screwtape has devoted his more recent efforts to promoting the Cult of the Ugly and relativism in the schools.

It has been seven hundred years since Dante showed us how easy it is to fall off the straight way. It is my belief that C. S. Lewis (like both Virgil and Beatrice) can help us keep to the road.

This book has had a rather interesting genesis. It began its life as two separate speeches that I gave for two of the finest C. S. Lewis organizations (the New York C. S. Lewis Society and the C. S. Lewis Foundation): in August 2003 I delivered a plenary address on The Abolition of Man for a symposium held at the Immaculate Conception Center in Douglastown, New York; in July 2005 I delivered a plenary address for the Oxbridge Conference in Oxford, England, under the title “Rehabilitating Beauty: The Good, the True, and the Beautiful in the Fiction of C. S. Lewis.” I later turned these speeches into essays and then expanded them further into the book you hold in your hand. “Screwtape’s Millennial Toast” was written earlier (in 2001), and I have had the opportunity, on many occasions, to dress myself up as Screwtape (in a white tuxedo) and deliver the toast dramatically. In April 2004 I presented the toast as a plenary address for the Seventh Annual C. S. Lewis & the Inklings Conference held at LeTourneau University in Longview, Texas, at which point it was printed, in a very limited edition, in the proceedings of the conference.

Parts of this book have also appeared, in altered form, as freestanding essays in journals: (1) parts of chapters 13–15 have appeared as “The Dangers of a Values-Free Education: C. S. Lewis and the Abolition of Man,” Bulletin of the New York C. S. Lewis Society, September/October 2003; (2) those same chapters have also appeared, in a very different form, as “Excluded Middle School: Why C. S. Lewis Was Right about Chests,” Touchstone, July/August 2005; (3) chapters 19–21 form the core of “Aslan in the Public Square,” in Reasons for Faith: Making a Case for the Christian Faith (edited by Norman L. Geisler and Chad Meister for Crossway Books, 2007); and (4) chapters 22–25 form the core of “Aslan and the Academy,” The City, Spring 2008.

PART I

RESTORING BEAUTY

CHAPTER 1:

FRACTURED FAIRY TALES AND THE CULT OF THE UGLY

In a review of the animated film Shrek, published in the July/August 2001 issue of Books & Culture, Eric Metaxas offers a brave and insightful critique that is undergirded by an essential element of the Christian worldview that is too often overlooked today: namely, that the good, the true, and the beautiful not only exist, but also are interrelated. The film, which offers a clever deconstructive parody both of fairy tales and of Disney, concerns an antisocial ogre (Shrek) whose swamp is suddenly overrun by fairy-tale characters who have been displaced by a tyrannical king (Farquaad). In return for ridding his swamp of these unwanted guests, Shrek agrees to rescue a princess (Fiona) and hand her over to Farquaad. The audience cheers on Shrek as he frees Fiona from her castle-prison, only to discover that there is a hitch. The beautiful Fiona is further imprisoned by a spell that causes her to transform into an ogre every night. Luckily, as in all fairy tales, there is a way out of her internal prison: when she kisses her true love, the spell will be broken. As one would expect, the film slowly builds up to the climactic moment when Shrek and Fiona (now in the guise of an ogre) kiss. In a parody of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, Fiona floats magically upward, beams of light shooting out from her limbs. She then glides gracefully back to earth where we expect her to be transformed, once and for all, into the beautiful princess. No such luck. Instead, she remains an ogre and, we are assured, will continue to remain an ogre for the rest of her life. The spell has been broken; she has become what she truly is.

“What is going on?” asks Metaxas.

Are beauty and nobility and innocence such medieval concepts that fairytales themselves cannot portray them positively? Must not only Shrek remain ugly, but Fiona become forever so? Shall the Ugly Duckling accept himself, and all swans turn into Ugly Ducklings, lest feelings get hurt? … Does Shrek really mean to say that fairy tale virtues don’t exist, or are relative, or meaningless? It reminds me of gray communists screaming that God does not exist and that all human beings need is bread and vodka and cement housing. Did anyone ever believe that?

The old fairy tales aver the opposite; that what everyone knows in his heart to be true is true, that there are such things as goodness and beauty and truth—and even though in this life they are often obscured or hidden altogether, a time will come when the truth will be revealed, when dragons will be slain and bewitched captives will be set free forever.

Amid the great popular and critical praise that Shrek received (the sequel to the film proved an even greater success at the box office), Metaxas’s voice offers a needed counterpoint. To most modern viewers (whether they be cynical, sensitive, or politically correct), the transformation of Fiona into an ogre is “no big deal.” Many would even hail it as teaching children the “valuable” egalitarian lesson that external beauty is unimportant, an elitist, “bourgeois” hang-up that needlessly divides and engenders low self-esteem in girls who can’t make the grade. Those who would make such a claim are, of course, well known to us. They are the ones who have systematically eliminated beauty contests from high schools and colleges across the country on the grounds that they discriminate against girls who are less physically attractive (odd that such people rarely, if ever, carry out this reasoning to its logical outcome: the elimination of high school and college football teams on the grounds that they discriminate against boys who are less physically strong). They are the ones who would outlaw black and white in favor of the colorless, lowest-common-denominator world of Metaxas’s “gray communists.”

Serendipitously, I had the opportunity to test Metaxas’s critique in the real world. My two children (Alex and Stacey) saw Shrek in the theater when they were seven and six years old. They didn’t say much about the film at the time, but when, a year later, one of my students let me borrow his DVD copy of Shrek, and I put it in my machine to watch with the kids, they both made it clear that they did not want to see it again. Six months later when Shrek 2 hit the cineplex and their grandparents offered to take them to see it, they both agreed that they’d rather see something else. This time I asked them why they did not want to see it. Alex and Stacey (who have been raised on equal doses of Bible stories, Greek mythology, and fairy tales) gave me the following reply: “We didn’t like the ending of Shrek; the princess is supposed to become beautiful at the end, not ugly.” I had never discussed Metaxas’s critique of the film with my kids. Their response was direct, innocent, and unbiased.

Well, maybe not totally unbiased. As Christian parents, my wife and I have always tried to steer our kids away from movies and cartoons that emphasize ugliness and revel in all the more unseemly aspects of the human body. That is not to say that we have insulated them (they saw all three Lord of the Rings films when they came out and all the Harry Potter films to date), but we have sought to instill in them the rudiments of aesthetic discernment. Just as there is a distinction between good vs. evil violence (The Lord of the Rings) and the senseless, dehumanizing slaughter that runs rampant in slasher and serial killer films (none of which I would let my kids see, even in edited form), so there is a distinction between movies and TV shows that portray ugliness as a thing to be transformed, redeemed, or endured for a higher purpose and those that simply offer us ugliness as an end in itself, that hold it up to our noses that we might inhale deeply and accept its universality and its triumph. Even so, in the heady climes of high culture, there is a world of difference between music that contains dissonant sounds within a greater package of beauty and music that surrenders itself totally to atonal cacophony.

As Dietrich Bonhoeffer has pointed out (The Cost of Discipleship, chapter 6), it is not blessed in and of itself to mourn or be persecuted; such things are only blessed if they are done for the sake of the Lord and carry with them their own internal promise of that wondrous joy that ever comes in the morning. Yes, we must embrace ugliness, hatred, and lies in the sense that they are part of the fabric of our fallen world and our fallen selves; but when we embrace them, we should do so neither realistically nor pragmatically, but eschatologically: with a view to the good end that is to come, with what Tolkien dubbed (in “On Fairy Stories”) the “eucatastrophe.” In this post-Freudian world in which we live, we have put the phobias and neuroses at the center and pushed “normalcy” out to the margin. More and more, we are doing the same for ugliness: enshrining it at the heart of our culture, while beauty is left to atrophy and decay.

In chapter 7 of The Sacred Romance, Brent Curtis and John Eldredge cut to the core of the problem:

Every woman is in some way searching for or running from her beauty and every man is looking for or avoiding his strength. Why? In some deep place within, we remember what we were made to be, we carry with us the memory of gods, image-bearers walking in the Garden. So why do we flee our essence? As hard as it may be for us to see our sin, it is far harder still for us to remember our glory. The pain of the memory of our former glory is so excruciating, we would rather stay in the pigsty than return to our true home.

As paradoxical as it may seem, we are often more afraid of beauty than of ugliness. The latter hides, conceals, distorts; the former uncovers, reveals, clarifies. Whatever exactly he meant by it, John Keats was right when he wrote that “beauty is truth, truth beauty.” He might have added that beauty is goodness, goodness beauty. The truth about us is that we were made both good and beautiful but that we have lost our original beauty and goodness. But the story does not end there. We will be restored someday to our original princess beauty; ugliness was not our ultimate origin, nor will it be our final destination (though it took the redemptive “ugliness” of the cross to bridge the gap between our arche and our eschaton, our beginning and our end). I believe, along with Curtis and Eldredge, that we all possess within ourselves an antenatal memory of Eden and of our perfection in Eden. It is a memory that we cannot wholly shake off, though many try frantically to do so. The fear of success is often a stronger, more intimidating thing than the fear of failure. Better to kill the dream ourselves than risk having it blow up in our faces. Ugliness (like lies and evil) makes no demands on us; rather, it invites us to sink slowly and peacefully into the mire. The good, the true, and the beautiful are all action words that call us to take a quick glance backward and then trudge on with hope toward the distant land that is our true home.

“In speaking of this desire for our own far-off country,” writes C. S. Lewis in his finest sermon, “The Weight of Glory,” “… I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence.” Lewis might have added a fourth name, Fairy Tales, or he might, more simply, have grouped all four names under the single category of Beauty. In saying this, I am not putting words into Lewis’s mouth. Of all the writers of the twentieth century (that era when ugliness truly came in to its own), Lewis was perhaps the greatest apologist for beauty. He saw all too well the modern aversion to beauty (though the word has traditionally stood at the center of literary theory, modern and postmodern theorists have all but ignored it), and he understood that the cause of that aversion is finally less aesthetic than it is psychological: a rather desperate defense mechanism to protect our jaded, agnostic age from that terrible Beauty that dwells together with Goodness and Truth in the heart of the Creator and of the creation he made. Understanding further that when beauty is deconstructed, goodness and truth inevitably follow in its wake, Lewis set himself the dual task of restoring (or rehabilitating, to use a favorite word of Lewis’s) the reputation of beauty in his nonfiction and embodying (nay, incarnating) its presence in his fiction.

Indeed, the entire impetus for Lewis’s fiction may be found in a passage from “The Weight of Glory” in which he discusses the exact nature of that heavenly beauty which we spend all our lives yearning for:

We want so much more—something the books on aesthetics take little notice of. But the poets and the mythologies know all about it. We do not want merely to see beauty, though, God knows, even that is bounty enough. We want something else which can hardly be put into words—to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it. That is why we have peopled air and earth and water with gods and goddesses and nymphs and elves—that, though we cannot, yet these projections can enjoy in themselves that beauty, grace, and power of which Nature is the image. That is why the poets tell such lovely falsehoods.

Among this blessed band of poets and storytellers, Lewis deserves a high place of honor. He may perhaps deserve the highest place of honor, for he spoke up for beauty when it was neither fashionable nor “politically correct” to do so. Throughout history, there have been many cultures that have allowed homosexual behavior; however, until a decade or so ago, no society (Christian, pagan, or otherwise) would have ever dreamed of legitimizing gay marriage. In the same way, though history is rife with eras in which ugliness and brutality came to the fore, only in the latter half of the twentieth century has beauty itself come under attack in the worlds of both high culture and low culture. One hopes that the barbarians who overran Rome could have, with a little aesthetic training, been taught to appreciate the beauty of Roman art and architecture; our modern and postmodern cultural vandals cannot excuse their barbarism on the grounds of ignorance. Their rejection of beauty (and the truth, goodness, harmony, order, and, yes, hierarchy that go with it) is carried out in an educated, self-conscious way.

Even so is it the case for much of what passes for teen culture in the twenty-first century. I came of age in what was surely the most pathetic decade of the twentieth century, the ’70s, and we boys back then dressed in a way that today appears ludicrously and laughably ugly. But (and that but makes all the difference) we thought that we looked good. We wanted to look our best, to be Adonises in polyester. Today, more and more young people (and not-so-young people) dress themselves ugly, not out of ignorance (as did we in the ’70s), but because they have embraced an entire culture and ethos of ugliness (one that takes in dress, music, art, language, etc.). This Cult of the Ugly (like the sociopolitical movement for gay marriage) is a totally new thing, the perverse fruit of the twisted tree of modernism. And yet, as crazy as it may seem, many today consider these two fruits to be self-evident “givens” that should be accepted as the right and logical upshot of modern progress, the kinds of things that our ancestors would have eagerly embraced if they had only known better.

Against this growing tide of ugliness, we who believe in beauty (and especially we who believe in beauty because we worship a God who is the source and embodiment of Beauty, Truth, and Goodness) can hold up joyously (and defiantly) the fiction of C. S. Lewis. Here we can rest assured that no good and true princess will end up ugly in the end and that order, harmony, and balance will prevail. Here, the swans (to refer back to Metaxas) will not have to become ugly one and all so that the feelings of the Ugly Duckling will not be hurt. Heaven, as Lewis presents it in The Great Divorce (that wonderful work which, along with The Pilgrim’s Regress and The Screwtape Letters, dwells in the generic no man’s land between fiction and nonfiction), is a place of pure beauty and joy. Nothing may infect or spoil or diminish that joy. The saints who live there in glory unblemished will be finally free from “the demand of the loveless and the self-imprisoned that they should be allowed to blackmail the universe: that till they consent to be happy (on their own terms) no one else shall taste joy.” No one there will applaud the ending of Shrek as teaching a vital egalitarian lesson, for no one there will be fooled by the lie that the only way to lift up humanity is to drag everyone down to the same level. They will blissfully transcend that manipulation that disguises itself as pity and that makes its appeal in the name of sensitivity and fairness. In short, they “will not call blue yellow to please those who insist on still having jaundice, nor make a midden of the world’s garden for the sake of some who cannot abide the smell of roses.”

Both passages quoted above are taken from chapter 13 of The Great Divorce, and, though they embody Lewis’s own beliefs, they are put in the mouth of one of the great fairy-tale writers of the nineteenth century, George MacDonald. Indeed, in between the two quoted passages, Lewis has MacDonald express a truth that not only carries rich theological overtones but also lies at the very heart of all true fairy tales. The truth (all but forgotten in our day and age) is that there can be only two possible eschatons: “Either the day must come when joy prevails and all the makers of misery are no longer able to infect it, or else for ever and ever the makers of misery can destroy in others the happiness they reject for themselves.” Shrek opts for the latter and allows ugliness to win the day. But the great fiction of C. S. Lewis (The Space Trilogy, The Chronicles of Narnia, Till We Have Faces) presents us with a different incantation, one that we ignore at our peril.

CHAPTER 2:

THE SPACE TRILOGY I:

THE BEAUTY OF HIERARCHY

Unlike the seven Chronicles of Narnia, which share a similar tone and structure, the three novels that make up The Space Trilogy (Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, That Hideous Strength) vary wildly in their generic categories. The first (published in 1938) reads like a fast-paced sci-fi fantasy in the manner of H. G. Wells or Isaac Asimov. The second (1943), much slower and more ponderous than the first, offers a Miltonic theodicy, a reworking of Paradise Lost in which Eve does not give in to temptation. The third (1945), which is as long as the first two books combined, invites its readers into a very different world that blends spiritual warfare with the more homely conventions of the realistic, domestic novel. And yet, despite their differences, all three novels center around a struggle between good and evil in which the protagonists grow slowly toward the good, the true, and the beautiful while the antagonists move increasingly away from all goodness, all truth, all beauty.

The fantastical plot of Out of the Silent Planet concerns a philologist named Ransom, who is kidnapped and taken by spaceship to Malacandra (Mars). Upon arriving on Mars, he breaks free of his abductors and hides out with one of the three species of rational creatures that dwell on Malacandra: the Hrossa. The Hrossa are an intelligent, beaverlike race of warriors who lack all the trappings of industrialization but who possess the Homeric virtues of honor and courage. At first, Ransom, who is very much a product of the modern world, looks down on the Hrossa for their lack of scientific progress. But as he lives and hunts with the Hrossa and learns their language and their poetry, he comes to see that they possess a deep-seated nobility that surpasses that of his “advanced” European civilization. What Ransom comes to see in the culture of the Hrossa in particular (and Malacandra in general) is precisely a kind of beauty that our modern world has lost: a beauty that rests on virtue, balance, and hierarchy.

In Plato’s Republic, the ideal society is divided into three classes, each of which possesses a specific virtue: the guardians (who rule by wisdom), the soldiers (who embody fortitude), and the artisans (who practice self-control). When each class performs its proper function, justice is the result. On Malacandra, the courageous Hrossa share their planet with the more prudent, abstract-thinking Sorns and the industrious, temperate blue-collar Pfifltriggi. All three races live together in utopic harmony under a sort-of spiritual philosopher-king known as the Oyarsa (an angelic guardian spirit who also rules the lesser angels, or eldila). Ransom’s initial reaction to this social-political-religious system is one of scorn and condescension; he can understand the relationship between the three races only in realpolitik terms and can think of the Oyarsa only as a cold, arbitrary deity. However, these modernist prejudices (and prejudices they turn out to be, though they appear at first to Ransom to be facts) are soon dispelled by Ransom’s sabbatical with the Hrossa and his meeting with the Oyarsa. Slowly, Ransom’s eyes are opened to the beauty of the Malacandran way of life, and with that perception of beauty comes a realization of the essential truth and goodness of Malacandra.

In Out of the Silent Planet, as in all of Lewis’s fiction, beauty is rarely something concrete or obvious that can be subjected to analysis and measurement. Beauty is a mystery that must be found, something for which we must foster eyes that see. Again and again in his fiction, the good and evil characters are presented with the same empirical reality, yet see in it vastly different things. Despite the fact that his evil abductors (Weston and Devine) spend more time on Malacandra than Ransom, neither of them is able to view the Malacandrans as anything but ignorant savages. They are as blind to the beauty of the planet as they are to the goodness of its inhabitants or the truth of the Oyarsa. Indeed, Devine and Weston share more in common with the Oyarsa of Earth, who, we learn, rebelled against the Creator (Maleldil). Since the innocent Malacandrans (like the Houyhnhnms of Gulliver’s Travels) have no words for evil or falsehood, they refer to this fallen Oyarsa as the Bent One.

Of all the memorable phrases and titles that Lewis coins in his fiction, that of the “Bent One” presents Lewis at his most insightful and prophetic. What I termed above the Cult of the Ugly might just as accurately be dubbed the Cult of the Bent. The modern (or, better, postmodern) fascination with and propagation of ugliness marks not some new form of creation, but a twisting and perverting of that true beauty and harmony which God built into our cosmos and into our souls: built so deeply and ineradicably that even the pagan Plato perceived glimpses of it. Yes, it may be argued, ugliness embodies a legitimate form of self-expression, but if it does, then it is a self-expression that rises up out of a rejection of self and the higher purposes for which self was made. In Contra Julian (I.9), Confessions (VII.15–16), and elsewhere, the great philosopher-theologian Augustine famously argued that evil did not possess its own separate existence and integrity but was a privation, or lack, of good. In the same way, deception and ugliness are best viewed not as positive realities but as perversions of truth and beauty.

Chesterton reminds us in Orthodoxy (chapter 6) that “there are an infinity of angles at which one falls, only one at which one stands.” While Ransom moves slowly toward achieving that one right angle, Weston (the primary villain of the novel) swerves off in a variety of bent and unstable angles. In addition to his refusal to see the beauty of Malacandra, he perpetrates a specific form of self-deception that lies at the root of the growing tide of ugliness in our day. That deception (which Lewis exposes in many of his works) arises from the bent belief that a single, isolated virtue can be deemed so important that all other virtues can be violated in the pursuit of it. For Weston, that single virtue is the preservation of the human species, a virtue he considers so vital that he is willing to reduce Malacandra to an ugly, barren wasteland (to make a desert and call it peace, we might say) to ensure the survival of the species. In our own twenty-first-century world, egalitarianism has been hailed as so grand a virtue that everything (including, and especially, beauty) may be sacrificed to it. Thus in the name of the egalitarian idol (for that is what it is), beauty pageants are outlawed, fairy tales are distorted, femininity and masculinity are either denied or conflated, the canon is purged of anything that is deemed (by modern standards) to be racist, sexist, or homophobic, and Christians (who should know better) allow their syntax and rhetoric—not to mention their hymns and Bible translations—to be neutered and “uglified” through the use of gender-inclusive language. And the irony of it all is that we don’t even understand the true nature of that virtue for which we are prepared to sacrifice all. For Weston, human beings are superior to (more civilized than) the rational creatures of Malacandra, not because of the beauty of our art, the goodness of our deeds, or the truth of our philosophy, but because we can build taller buildings, more clever gadgets, and more powerful weapons. For we of the twenty-first century, equality no longer means what it meant to the virtuous pagans, to the writers of the Bible, to our own founding fathers (the intrinsic worth and value of every human being) but a dull and colorless sameness that, if it ever were achieved, would make the old Soviet Union look like a fairyland. (Mel Gibson’s decision to portray Satan as an androgynous figure in his film The Passion of the Christ was a stroke of genius worthy of Lewis at his best.)

In the last chapter of the Bible, the angel who speaks to John delivers this troubling command-warning-prophecy about the times to come: “He that is unjust, let him be unjust still: and he which is filthy, let him be filthy still: and he that is righteous, let him be righteous still: and he that is holy, let him be holy still” (verse 11). As we approach the Apocalypse, these sobering words suggest that the good will become more good and the bad more bad. Each of the three novels that make up The Space Trilogy is, in its own way, apocalyptic, and it is surely no coincidence that the distinctions between the protagonists and antagonists become more and more pronounced as the trilogy progresses. Accordingly, the division between Ransom and Weston (which is grounded firmly in the former’s acceptance and the latter’s rejection of the good, the true, and the beautiful) grows wider and more unbridgeable in the second novel, Perelandra.

This time, Ransom is carried to Perelandra (Venus), not by a spaceship but by the eldila, where he is commissioned by Maleldil to help the newly created Eve of Venus to resist temptation. Once again, his antagonist is Weston, but this time, it is a very different Weston: one who has surrendered nearly all of his humanity and who is possessed (literally) by the bent Oyarsa of Earth. This Weston (whom Lewis calls the Unman) is but a shell of his former self; he has lost even the single virtue of species survival that motivated him in Out of the Silent Planet. His only goal now is to pull the Venusian Eve down to his own fallen, depraved level, to rob her of her prelapsarian beauty and grace. He is a loathsome character who, at one point in the novel, systematically rips open the bellies of frogs and leaves their corpses strewn on the ground. He is absolutely dead to the beauty of Perelandra, a beauty that Lewis describes in some of his finest, most haunting prose. Like Satan, who is not only the Father of Lies, but the Lord of Evil and Ugliness (witness the state to which he reduces the demoniac of Mark 5), Lewis’s Unman is antijoy, antihope, antilife. He worships a god, but the deity he serves is neither personal nor even a distinct being; Weston’s god (like Marx’s view of history) is an impersonal, amorphous force that is ever evolving. Such gods (whether they be served by fictional characters or by the makers of our modern and postmodern culture) offer ideal justification for the creation (I had almost said anticreation) of that colorless, sexless world described above.

Luckily for the reader of Perelandra, Weston’s vision is not the only one offered. While the Unman grows successively less human, Ransom’s eyes and ears and heart and soul are opened to ascending levels of greater and greater beauty. All of his senses are stimulated and awakened by the rich fecundity of Perelandra. Much of Venus is covered by ocean and, skimming the surface of those pristine waters are floating islands that move and fluctuate and dance with the waves. Ransom rides and sleeps on the islands, and their gentle undulations fill him with a pleasure he has never known. The “exuberance” and “prodigality” of Venus, writes Lewis in Perelandra, overwhelm Ransom’s senses with an “excessive pleasure” that is neither sexual nor asexual but trans-sexual: a pleasure our earthly bodies are too weak to enjoy. In a moment of sudden insight, Ransom realizes that whereas the landscapes of Malacandra are essentially masculine, those of Perelandra are quintessentially feminine. Indeed, near the end of the novel, as he gazes on the twin Oyarsa of Mars and Venus, Ransom realizes that masculinity and femininity are not oppressive social constructs that need to be deconstructed in the name of the egalitarian idol but true essences that lie deeper than biological or verbal differences. The former, writes Lewis, was like rhythm, the latter like melody; the one seemed to hold a spear, while the other held its palms open. Between the two there is a complementarity, a balance, a harmony that cannot (and must not) be collapsed into homogeneity. They are the ideals toward which human beings were created to strive: the masculine ideal of courage and strength, the feminine ideal of beauty and grace—both of them equally good and equally true. When we lose sight of that ideal, beauty eventually and inevitably fades or grows bent. The final (eschatological) vision that Ransom receives is that of a cosmic dance in which all is hierarchy and all is equality, in which the center constantly shifts and yet the center is always God. What he sees is more true, more real, more lasting than all the abstract, antihumanistic, “scientific” studies and theories of Weston.

CHAPTER 3:

THE SPACE TRILOGY II:

THE BEAUTY OF THE NORMAL

Near the end of Perelandra, Ransom destroys the Unman, but the conflict between them carries on into the third novel, That Hideous Strength. Here, the division between the beauty-affirming and beauty-denying worldviews of Ransom and Weston are ratcheted up once again, not by drawing the conflict even further into celestial regions but by drawing it back to Earth and embodying it in two antagonistic communities. This time, the villain is not a single individual but a secret society known as the N.I.C.E. (the National Institute of Coordinated Experiments), which seeks, through tactics that would make the mischievous Machiavelli blush, to establish an efficient, “scientific,” omnicompetent state. To say that the N.I.C.E. hates beauty in all its forms would be a gross understatement; at the core of its bent dream of domination lies a disgust for the physical itself (whether natural or human). Indeed, the crowning achievement of its antinatural, antihumanistic science is the artificial preservation of the bodiless human head of a criminal. Ironically, the Head (a ghastly, perverse symbol of what results when the proper balance between body and soul, physical and spiritual is lost) controls the very scientists who created it; indeed, despite their commitment to atheistic materialism, they pay the Head almost religious worship. But the irony, as it turns out, runs even deeper. In actuality, the Head (and all of the N.I.C.E.) is itself controlled by demons whose hatred of organic life, of individuality, and of human emotion is boundless; their image of a perfect world is the moon: dead, cold, dark, and sterile. The Cult of the Ugly, we might say, with a vengeance.

In contrast and opposition to the N.I.C.E. stands the Society of St. Anne’s (alone and seemingly defenseless): a ragtag bunch of quirky, unremarkable believers who live together in fellowship under the patriarchal leadership of Ransom (since returned from Perelandra). They lack completely the ordered efficiency and technological wizardry of Belbury (the headquarters of the N.I.C.E.), but they possess at their core something more vital. For Lewis, St. Anne’s represents England as she should be, that marvelous land of poets and dreamers that Lewis, in keeping with his fellow Inkling Charles Williams, liked to call Logres. She is the real, spiritual England that dwells within that unheroic “nation of shopkeepers” that postindustrial England had become. Her virtues are mostly medieval; her love of beauty distinctly nonutilitarian.

Into the dichotomous worlds of Belbury and St. Anne’s are ushered our unlikely protagonists: an average, rather unhappy bourgeois couple named Mark and Jane Studdock.