Volume 2, number 1 (April 2012)

Although C. S. Lewis was reticent about holding himself up as an expert in theology, in Mere Christianity he explains the relationship between the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit in a characteristically metaphorical and lucid way. Lewis bases his theology on a direct reading of a passage in Augustine’s De civitate Dei to which he added the explanatory metaphor of the ‘dance’ — an image scholars have begun to notice in his fiction — to bring alive to his readers the ‘spirit’ of love between the Father and Son that, as Augustine said, became the third person of the Trinity.

J. R. R. Tolkien’s short story ‘Leaf by Niggle’, embodies the theories of story, fantasy, and ‘myth’ which he outlined in his ‘Mythopoeia’, in ‘On Fairy-stories’, and in his letters. That view was eventually to appear more fully fleshed out in The Lord of the Rings.

In Lewis’ transposition of Milton’s Paradise to a distant world where Adam and Eve do not succumb to Satan, the structure of Eden is radically different from the enclosed garden familiar to most readers. In the novel Perelandra (1944), C.S. Lewis represents the Garden of Eden as an open and ‘shifting’ place. The new Garden of Eden, with Adam and Eve unfallen, is a place of indeterminate future, excitement, growth, and change, very unlike the static, safe, enclosed Garden — the hortus conclusus of traditional iconography — from which humanity is not just expelled but also, in some sense, escapes.
The innovation is not in the theological underpinnings that Lewis claims to share with Milton but in the literary devices that make evil in Perelandra seem boring, dead-end, and repetitive, while goodness is the clear source of change and excitement.