Mary as Mother and Queen of the world: insights from C.S. Lewis’s Perelandra

Some doctrines can be learned and accepted in the abstract, but not really come alive in the heart until some spark lights them up. Such has been the case for me with Catholic devotions and language concerning the Blessed Virgin Mary. I receive and believe the doctrines, I try to practice Marian piety to an extent, but it is not really alive in my heart the way it is for many Catholics. There are various reasons for it—dislike of what’s popular, impatience with feminine or touchy-feely piety, coldness towards parental figures, and probably others that I cannot see—but part of it is just that the doctrine has mostly been just that for me: abstract doctrine without the spark of life.

But there is fire out there, and once in awhile a spark will find some tinder in my heart to burn. I’ve drawn great nourishment from Velazquez’s 1645 ‘Coronation of the Virgin’ altarpiece:

http://crunchynotes.blogspot.ca/2010/01/the-coronation-of-virgin-1645.html

Stories are maybe the most natural way to learn things and to bring doctrine alive in human hearts. And I’ve found that C.S. Lewis’s science fiction novel Perelandra can do this for the Blessed Virgin Mary.

The most helpful teaching I’ve ever had on the Blessed Virgin Mary is that, as Christ is the New Adam, she is the New Eve. That principle opens up whole continents of meaning.

Perelandra is a story about a man named Elwin Ransom being sent to Venus on a divine mission to prevent a second Fall. There, he meets the unfallen Eve of Venus, called the Green Woman, the Lady, or the Queen, the first woman, who has not yet borne children. A large part of the story is thus about Eve, and so also illuminates Mary.

When Ransom first meets the Lady (ch. 5), it takes him a long time to realize that she and the King (whom he has not met) are the only people on Venus. She likewise does not realize that Ransom is not the Adam of Earth:

‘You mean,’ said Ransom slowly, ‘that you and he are the only two of your kind in the whole world?’

‘Of course.’ Then presently her face changed. ‘Oh, how young I have been,’ she said. ‘I see it now. ... I had forgotten that yours also was an older world than ours. I see – there are many of you by now. I had been thinking that of you also there were only two. I thought you were the King and Father of your world. But there are children of children of children by now, and you perhaps are one of these.’

‘Yes,’ said Ransom.

‘Greet your Lady and Mother well from me when you return to your own world,’ said the Green Woman. And now for the first time there was a note of deliberate courtesy, even of ceremony, in her speech. Ransom understood. She knew now at last that she was not addressing an equal. She was a queen sending a message to a queen through a commoner, and her manner to him was henceforward more gracious. He found it difficult to make his next answer.

‘Our Mother and Lady is dead,’ he said.

How it shook me the first time I read that line! Of course it’s a commonplace that Death entered the world with the Fall, and if Adam and Even had not eaten the fruit of the forbidden tree they would not have died. But although I must have realized that they would thus still be alive today, the picture had not sunk in. Adam and Eve were meant to rule as the Father and Mother all the generations of men. It is only because of the Fall, that is, because of Sin and the disruption of God’s plan, that we are deprived of our Father and Mother.

After Ransom meets the Lady, another man from Earth arrives who is Satan’s vehicle into the world of Venus. The central part of the novel concerns Satan’s attempt to persuade Eve into disobeying Christ (called Maleldil in their language) and so producing a second Fall. Ransom defeats Satan but is separated from the Lady, and arrives at the Throne of Venus where he meets the gods Venus and Mars: the angel rulers of the planets, Perelandra and Malacandra. The culmination of the book is the reunion of King and Queen and their taking up the rule of the planet Venus. They arrive at the Throne and Ransom beholds them together for the first time, having passed their tests. Then (ch. 17) comes for me one of the most moving passages in the book.

There was great silence on the mountain top and Ransom also had fallen down before the human pair. When at last he raised his eyes from the four blessed feet, he found himself involuntarily speaking though his voice was broken and his eyes dimmed. ‘Do not move away, do not raise me up,’ he said. ‘I have never before seen a man or a woman. I have lived all my life among shadows and broken images. Oh, my Father and my Mother, my Lord and my Lady, do not move, do not answer me yet. My own father and mother I have never seen. Take me for your son. We have been alone in my world for a great time.’

Perelandra then gives into their hands the rule of the planet Venus.

‘The floating lands and the firm lands,’ she was saying, ‘the air and the curtains at the gates of Deep Heaven, the seas and the Holy Mountain, the rivers above and the rivers of under-land, the fire, the fish, the birds, the beasts, and others of the waves whom yet you know not; all these Maleldil puts into your hand from this day forth as far as you live in time and farther. My word henceforth is nothing: your word is law unchangeable and the very daughter of the Voice. In all that circle which this world runs about Arbol [the Sun], you are Oyarsa [ruler]. Enjoy it well. Give names to all creatures, guide all natures to perfection. Strengthen the feebler, lighten the darker, love all.’

Finally the King declares his will for his World:

 ‘We will fill this world with our children. We will know this world to the centre. We will make the nobler of the beasts so wise that they will become hnau [people] and speak: their lives shall awake to a new life in us as we awake in Maleldil. When the time is ripe for it and ten thousand circlings are nearly at an end, we will tear the sky curtain and Deep Heaven shall become familiar to the eyes of our sons as the trees and the waves to ours.’

‘And what after this, Tor-Oyarsa?’ said Malacandra.

‘Then it is Maleldil’s purpose to make us free of Deep Heaven. Our bodies will be changed, but not all changed. We shall be as the eldila [angels], but not all as the eldila. And so will all our sons and daughters be changed in the time of their ripeness, until the number is made up which Maleldil read in His Father’s mind before times flowed.’

What I take from all this is that it is unnatural for mankind to be without a King and Queen. We were meant to be ruled by Adam and Eve, but they fell and perished. Their loss is a permanent wound to our kind—without them, we are children without grown-ups, a schoolyard where the teachers have gone. God does not simply undo, so the Redemption did not mean that Adam and Eve were restored (though we can hope for their resurrection—it is deeply satisfying at the end of Dante’s Divine Comedy to see Adam and Even throned in heaven with the saints). The Redemption does not restore the status quo ante, but it does redeem: grace does not obliterate nature, it perfects it. As there was a King and Queen in the origin, so there is a King and Queen now, in the new life of Christ. A greater King—and also a greater Queen.

Mary is the new Eve in the second Beginning of Man, the Resurrection in Christ. She is the Mother of all men in the New Life. She is the Queen of the Saints. And as Man has been raised even above the Angels, so the Queen of our kind is raised up as Queen of Heaven.

Well and good. But what has that to do with me now?

Mark well what the King and Queen are bidden to do as they take up the rule of their world. “Give names to all creatures, guide all natures to perfection. Strengthen the feebler, lighten the darker, love all.” The King and Queen are not just rulers in ceremony. Their authority is given to them to guide, to teach, to nourish, to build up their subjects. It has pleased God not to make every good directly with His own hand, but to give that work into the trust of subordinates. Hence the new and greater Queen has been given authority to guide, to teach, to nourish, to build up—to dispense graces and to intercede for nations.

Today, if someone has robbed us, we do not look directly to God to right the wrong, but to a human agent—the judge—into whose hands authority has been given. Through him justice is done; but not without God. So in the New Life, we have a Queen to whom we can look for grace. Through her grace is given; but not without God.