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psychology of temptation in Perelandra and Paradise Lost: What Lewis learned from Milton, The
Renascence, Winter 2000 by Tanner, John S
DURING the late 1930s and early 1940s, C. S. Lewis composed a space trilogy set on Mars, Venus, and Earth, respectively. In the middle novel, Perelandra, Lewis imagines a new myth of the Fall-only this time there is no Fall. Instead, through their obedience, Lewis' primal pair achieve for themselves and their posterity a more glorious, exalted mode of life than that which we endure owing to "Man's First Disobedience, and the Fruit / Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal taste / Brought Death into the World, and all our woe" (Paradise Lost 1.1-3).' Published only a year after A Preface to Paradise Lost, Perelandra is deeply influenced by Paradise Lost. Even its intriguing premise works out a possibility hinted at by Milton: what would have happened had our first parents been obedient? "If ye be found obedient, and retain / Unalterably firm his [God's] love entire" (PL 5:501-02), an angel tells Milton's Adam and Eve:
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Your bodies may at last turn all to spirit, Improv'd by tract of time, and wing'd ascend Ethereal, as wee, or may at choice Here [i.e., in Eden] or in Heav'nly Paradises dwell. (5.497-500)z
Perelandra envisions the prospect of progress without a fall, in very similar terms. Lewis' Adam-figure, Tor, explains that, having not fallen, he and his regal consort, Tinidril, will "fill this world with our children," "know this world to the centre," "make the nobler beasts so wise that they will . . . speak," and understand the "Deep Heaven" until, at last, "Our bodies will be changed, but not all changed. We shall be as the eldila [angels], but not all as eldila. And so will all our sons and daughters. . . ." (211).
In addition to supplying the premise for Perelandra, Paradise Lost also informs the novel's central core and most arresting feature: the subtle way Lewis re-imagines the Temptation. In Perelandra, this involves only the Woman, who remains unnamed and separated from her consort until the conclusion of the novel. Lewis' Eve-figure is a magnificent green lady living on floating islands of the planet Venus, a beautifully fluid world called Perelandra. Lewis devotes most of the novel to the Lady's temptation, tracing her growth from a condition of immediacy to selfreflectiveness. Her maturation is modulated through an intricate series of psychological stages initiated by dialogues with two beings from earth: Ransom, a humanist professor like Lewis; and Weston (later called the Unman), an evil physicist whose body is demonically possessed. These figures function as the Lady's good and bad angels, respectively. Ransom attempts to defend the Lady, the Unman to tempt her. Throughout, the Lady resists temptation but is made "older" and worn down by it. In the end, she must be rescued, which Ransom does by destroying the Unman.
The temptation of a guiltless yet growing character imposes a delicate and difficult challenge for Lewis. He must accommodate the Lady's increasing consciousness of evil, which seems to move her ever closer to transgression, without compromising her innocence. This is no easy task. But Lewis carries it off brilliantly, in large measure owing to what he had learned from Milton's treatment of the same problem in Paradise Lost. Indeed, a good way to gauge Lewis' achievement in imagining the psychology of temptation is to situate his novel in the critical controversy over the way Milton motivates the Fall. Placing Perelandra in the context of this critical crux in Paradise Lost highlights the novel's theological and artistic ingenuity. At the same time, it reminds us that in Perelandra Lewis works within a long literary and philosophical tradition-stretching back well before Milton to early Christian writers like Augustine, and continuing well after Lewis to contemporary Christian philosophers like Paul Ricoeur, to name only two important Christian thinkers who have wrestled with the perplexing problem of the incipience of evil in a truly sinless being.3
The crux in Milton criticism that most illuminates Perelandra is known as the problem of a fall before the Fall.4 This controversy heated up shortly after Lewis published, in rapid succession, A Preface to Paradise Lost and Perelandra. In the mid-40s, critics began to take Milton to task for the way he makes the Fall seem plausible by inventing a series of preliminary gestures foreshadowing it-such as when, Narcissus-like, Eve admires her beauty in a pool (4.449 ff.); or when she dreams about eating the forbidden fruit (5.28 if.); or when she insists on working alone as a way of asserting her independence (9.205 ff.). According to E. M. W. Tillyard, there was no way for Milton of making the transition from sinlessness to sin perfectly intelligible: "Under the terms of the story these two realms must be separated by a definite and dimensionless frontier: there cannot be a no-man's-land between" (10). Therefore, Milton "resorts to some faking. . . . He anticipates the Fall by attributing to Eve and Adam feelings which though nominally felt in the state of innocence are not actually compatible with it" (Tillyard 10-11). That is, to make the transgression seem plausible, Milton surreptitiously introduces fallen motives into Adam and Eve before they fall. As A. J. A. Waldock observes in a book aimed largely against Lewis' reading of Milton, "It is obvious that Adam and Eve must already have contracted human weakness before they can start on a course of conduct that leads to their fall: to put it another way, they must already be fallen (technically) before they can begin to fall" (61). Such remarks fueled a critical controversy over the poem's account of prelapsarian psychology. For some, the literary task of rendering the Temptation psychologically plausible seemed insuperable. Thus writer Millicent Bell,
