A couple weeks back I read Davenant Press’s Life on the Silent Planet, a collection of essays on the C. S. Lewis’ Space Trilogy.1 The pages include several excellent essays, and I don’t even remember which one made the most highlight of this, but while reading my attention was drawn again to this brilliant little passage from Perelandra, and its presence has only grown on my mind since. No doubt I will find myself rereading the books soon.
So, if you are unfamiliar with the book, the Green Lady here is the first woman on the planet Perelandra (Venus), an unfallen Eve-like figure, and Elwin Ransom has been sent from Earth to meet her. As the two talk, Ransom finds himself surprised and confused that the Lady has no notion of disappointment or even aversion to anything that may befall her. As he tries to explain these ideas, he notes the pause that came over her when she saw his figure, first expecting him to be the King, her husband. Thus we arrive at the Lady’s epiphany, and another one of Lewis’ brightest moral insights:
“What you have made me see,” answered the Lady, “is as plain as the sky, but I never saw it before. Yet it has happened every day. One goes into the forest to pick food and already the thought of one fruit rather than another has grown up in one's mind. Then, it may be, one finds a different fruit and not the fruit one thought of. One joy was expected and another is given. But this I had never noticed before—that the very moment of the finding there is in the mind a kind of thrusting back, or setting aside. The picture of the fruit you have not found is still, for a moment, before you. And if you wished—if it were possible to wish—you could keep it there. You could send your soul after the good you had expected, instead of turning it to the good you had got. You could refuse the real good; you could make the real fruit taste insipid by thinking of the other.”
Here as elsewhere in Lewis’ fiction, he does a remarkable job breaking down a deep moral insight into unusually simple terms. It’s a basic element of our lives as finite human beings that we do not always get the good things we were thinking of or hoping for. Even apart from the Fall, you might pick some peppers, wait for some new ones to appear, and go out one day expecting to find another one ripe and ready, only to find that it still needs some time. Right at that moment, your will is faced with a choice. On one hand, you can gladly embrace God’s wise ordination of a natural process that takes the time it does and offers you an opportunity to pursue other goods in the meantime as you wait patiently. On the other hand, you can cling to your desire to have a ripe pepper right now, throwing contempt and ingratitude on these other goods God has given in the very same moment.
Obviously, when put in these terms, the first option is good, and the second is sin. Indeed, it is possible to view the second option as something like the root character of sin. Sin consists in so loving the good which God has not given you now that you despise the good He does will for you now. Lewis uses precisely this to have Ransom explain to the Lady the role of Satan (called an eldil, a name for angels in the trilogy) on earth.
“There have been eldila who did not think it a joy [to accept a new good],” said Ransom.
“How?”
“You spoke yesterday, Lady, of clinging to the old good instead of taking the good that came.”
“Yes—for a few heart–beats.”
“There was an eldil who clung longer—who has been clinging since before the worlds were made.”
“But the old good would cease to be a good at all if he did that.”
“Yes. It has ceased. And still he clings.”
Thus Lewis portrays a kind of discontentment as lying even at the heart of Satan’s fall. This, I think, should be sobering if we think about daily life. Our days are indeed littered with occasions in which the goods we want are not what we get. Far too often and easily we turn away from what we do get with disdain, ingratitude, or annoyance. We are out of honey and complain because we have the good of sugar instead. God gifts us a conversation with one of His elderly saints, and we only pine for a different conversation with someone else. We were hoping to go to Chick-fil-A and come to despise the realization that God has blessed this as the day of rest. These accumulated grumblings and complaints in the heart pull us away from gratitude toward God, and they often just as much set us in one of those bad attitudes that encourage us to mistreat our neighbors.
With the start of my third year of teaching, I’ve been mulling quite a bit over “clinging to the old good.” My first and thoroughly beloved class brought incomparable joys I’d never expected, and while the second year offered a bit of a bridge, now the temptation to linger mourning and longing for the past looms large. Running into this passage from Lewis again with this on the mind came as timely and obviously needed counsel.
But speaking of school, just last week the whole school was reciting daily, “Do all things without grumbling or complaining.” It is this essentially demonic flight from the goods God actually provides in favor of imagined goods that drives the murmuring, fussing, and bad attitudes in our lives, the wellspring of so much more sin. Yet this temptation tends to be persistent and often seems nearly impossible to conquer, save only by great grace.
This brings us to the solution, the right attitude, which can only be praise, thanksgiving, and the cultivation of Christian contentment. What that looks like in full few ever quite see, but I must here only return to Perelandra:
“You could never understand, Lady,” he replied. “But in our world not all events are pleasing or welcome. There may be such a thing that you would cut off both your arms and your legs to prevent it happening—and yet it happens: with us.”
“But how can one wish any of those waves not to reach us which Maleldil is rolling towards us?”
[…]
“Every joy is beyond all others. The fruit we are eating is always the best fruit of all."
Rhys Laverty (the editor) and many of the contributors, of course, detest the name “Space Trilogy” and prefer “Ransom Trilogy” or even “Heavens Trilogy,” but, Rhys, since ESTABLISHED CUSTOM HAS THE FORCE OF LAW, I refuse to change.