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.

Modern antinomianism is worse than that

Antionomianism: from the Greek anti (against) + nomos (law).

The prevailing spirit of the age has, for the last fifty years at least, been antinomian. It is impatient with the constraints of law. Eric Hobsbawm—no Christian and no reactionary—in his The Age of Extremes recognised that our period, since the 1960s, has been distinct in that people have little sense of obligation to obey rules. This was and continues to be a key feature of the Sexual Revolution. In fact one might say that antinomianism is what drives the forward pressure of the Sexual Revolution: every time the last constraint is broken, you run up against a new constraint and so you have to break that, too.

Since the Church has of late been utterly unable to inoculate people against the spirit of the age, antinomianism now marks the culture within the Church, as well. The canon lawyer Edward Peters recently pointed out one example:

http://canonlawblog.wordpress.com/2013/12/04/antinomianism-in-high-places-is-still-antinomianism/

But all debates within the Church since the ‘60s have been marked by this hostility and impatience towards law.

All this is common knowledge to anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear. People today resist being told what to do, by the moral law or by positive human law.

But modern antinomianism is actually much worse than this.

The dislike of moral law and positive law is the leading edge of our antinomian age: this is where the attack on law begins. But the beating heart of the zeitgeist is the hatred of the ultimate law: modern antinomianism is fundamentally the hatred of Reality.

Reality, What Is, The Way Things Are—this is the ultimate law, the final constraint. After all social mores and positive human law have been stripped away, Reality stands there ready to teach you a lesson. It works the other way, too: Reality is the ground of all morals and law, so as long as Reality stands, they cannot completely fall.

Postmodernism, gender theory, and queer theory have in the academy become so hegemonic that it seems the agreed-upon philosophy of highly educated people today is that Reality is a social construct. Therefore, it can be changed, mainly by changes in language. But that is only the most clear and un-hidden expression of the hatred of Reality.

Peter Kreeft speaking about women and the priesthood, said that advocates of women ordination who reject the fact of sexual difference, “reject this fact, and therefore usually facts in general.” He was profoundly right. And it’s more general than that: wherever antinomianism appears today, you will find people impatient with Reality itself.

This is very bad—much worse than mere rebellion against human law, which is sometimes necessary, or against moral constraint, which is perennial. But to reject Reality itself is to reverse the fundamental priority of all the religions and philosophies which have civilized mankind up to now. These all took it for granted that the aim was to live in conformity with reality. To reject Reality itself is not even sub-Christian: it is the definition of the diabolic state of mind. It shows that the spirit of our age is simply Satan.

That antinomianism has so deeply infect the Church is terrifying, because it is the mark of Satan and his angels. And it is not curable by human means.

You cannot argue with antinomians. How could antinomianism be argued against? What would you appeal to? All argument requires some shared premise: if a person simply rejects Reality, what is left? The only cure for antinomianism is the cure for alcoholism: hitting bottom. If a person reveals themself as an antinomian—that is, as dishonest—then you can only let them get bashed around by Reality until they realize that their way of life is insane. But they may not: like Satan, they may simply become more and more hardened in their anger and resentment that What Is Is.

“Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.”

Truth is the essential value — honesty is the essential virtue

Truth is the essential value, the value which can never be sacrificed or compromised for any other. Therefore loyalty to truth—that is, honesty—is the essential virtue, the first prerequisite for all other virtues and all human life. Without honesty, all fails.

Truth is simply Reality / What Is / The Way Things Are. Aristotle defined true and false in this way: “To say of what is that it is not, or of what is not that it is, is false, while to say of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not, is true” (Metaphysics, IV.7.1011b25). Aquinas said Veritas est adaequatio rei et intellectus: “truth is the equation of thing and intellect” (De Veritate, Q.1, A.1).

One way to define sin is turning aside from the truth. Chesterton said in his poem Ecclesiastes:

There is one sin: to call a green leaf grey,

Whereat the sun in heaven shuddereth.

In the book of Genesis ch. 3, Eve turned aside from the truth that God, who never lies, had forbidden the fruit of the tree in the midst of the garden ‘lest ye die,’ and instead acted on the serpent’s lie that ‘ye shall not surely die... and ye shall be as gods.’ This was disobedience to God, which is another way of saying betrayal of the truth.

Satan is said to have fallen through pride; that is, through pretending that he is greater than God and refusing to give to God His due. In Paradise Lost book 5, Satan begins his rebellion by denying that God created him:

That we were formed then say’st thou? And the work

Of secondary hands, by task transferred

From Father to his Son? Strange point and new! ...

We know no time when we were not as now;

Know none before us, self-begot, self-raised...

And when Satan confronts the loyal armies of God in book 6, Abdiel defies him thus:

Apostate, still thou err’st, nor end wilt find

Of erring, from the path of truth remote.

Indeed, Satan’s fall is shown as a progressive descent into nonsense and self-deception.

If truth is just What Is, then any turning aside from truth must bring failure. This is why sin is not just wicked, but fruitless. And why it is false love to tolerate sin in the name of love. That is based on an idea that the definition of sin is arbitrary, that it corresponds to nothing about reality.

Likewise, virtue can be defined as loyalty to the truth. The great philosophical and religious traditions have done exactly this. C.S. Lewis illustrates this in The Abolition of Man ch. 1: “St Augustine defines virtue as ordo amoris, “the ordinate condition of the affections in which every object is accorded that kind of degree of love which is appropriate to it... In early Hinduism that conduct in men which can be called good consists in conformity to, or almost participation in, the Rta—that great ritual or pattern of nature and supernature which is revealed alike in the cosmic order, the moral virtues, and the ceremonial of the temple. Righteousness, correctness, order, the Rta, is constantly identified with satya or truth, correspondence to reality... The Chinese also speak of a great thing (the greatest thing) called the Tao... It is Nature, it is the Way, the Road. It is the Way in which the universe goes on, the Way in which things everlastingly emerge, stilly and tranquilly, into space and time. It is also the Way in wihch every man should tread in mitation of that cosmic and supercosmic progression, conforming all activities to that great exemplar. ‘In ritual,’ says the Analects, ‘it is harmony with Nature that is prized.’ The ancient Jews likewise praise the Law as being ‘true’.”

The Western tradition of natural law likewise bases ethics not in arbitrary Divine command, but in the nature of reality itself.

Thus virtue is the practice of conforming oneself to Reality. It is a participation in truth.

C.S. Lewis said if you put second things first, you won’t get first things or second things. If you put first things first and second things second, you will get first things and second things, too. Truth is the ultimate First Thing.

‘A time for Truth and a time for Grace’ – a tool for the subversion of Truth

“I guess the problem is that I am talking about Truth, and they are talking about Grace. Maybe I should focus less on Truth and more on Grace...”

So said a Catholic whom I hold in high esteem. I’ve heard similar things from other serious Christians. I’ve also heard it applied from the other direction: “You’re talking about Truth, but I’m talking about Grace... You need a balance of Grace and Truth... Sometimes you should speak Truth, but sometimes you should speak Grace... Truth needs to give way to Grace...” and so on. This vocabulary of “Truth on the one hand, Grace on the other” seems to be a meme among young Christians. But I see one problem with it: it is a device of Satan.

It is a trick used to confuse speech and darken counsel. It is used to trap Christians who are loyal to Truth—that is, who are honest—by provoking them to guilt about whether they practice mercy.

It is simply and solely a weapon against Truth; and it is a sinister one because it exploits the tender Christian conscience about judgment and mercy. Every Christian knows there are grounds for accusing himself here, so an attack like this can strike home and turn him from his defence of Truth (in whatever conversation he’s in) to self-doubt.

The ‘Grace and Truth’ language is always used to accuse the ‘Truth’ party in defence of the ‘Grace’ party. It is not used in defence of Truth against Grace. How could it be? No one who was really defending the Truth would use it, because it concedes the whole point: that when talking about Truth, one is thereby not talking about Grace. And if that were true, wouldn’t the ‘Grace’ party, as a Christian, have a clearer conscience? wouldn’t they be less vulnerable to an attack on the grounds of neglecting Truth?

I heard it said that Grace and Truth are two sides of the same coin. They are not: Truth is the metal the coin is made of; Grace is the imprint on the coin. There is no ‘balance of Grace and Truth’, no ‘time for one and time for the other’. You always need Truth. In every action, every thought, every word of speech, Truth is essential. If you let go of Truth even a little bit, for any reason at all, to that extent you undermine whatever good you are trying to do.

In fact, Truth is the foundation of Grace. You can have Truth without Grace; but you cannot have Grace without Truth. Truth without Grace is not enough for salvation, but Grace itself when it comes forms part of the Truth. And Christians need to speak the Truth about Grace. If you aren’t loyal to Truth, then you won’t get true Grace, you’ll get comforting lies.

Here then is the real distinction in these debates: True Grace and comforting lies.

The culture we live in has abandoned Truth and therefore also abandoned Grace; it now insists that the hard corners of reality be corked with comforting lies. Christians, raised in this culture, are very vulnerable to being tricked into thinking that Grace means pretending things are what they are not; that is, that Grace means comforting lies. It does not. Grace looks at the Truth and does not blink.