Into the Wave: Perelandra's Floating Lands in Lutheran Perspective

Amy Lakeman

Lutheran theology is a theology of lived tensions — law and gospel, sinner and saint. It’s a theology of relationship, prioritizing trust in God over reliance on our own faculties. And it’s a theology that, frankly, really annoyed my peers in a 2020 humanities seminar. The course explored great Western writers’ understandings of the question “How should we live?” Its participants were people of goodwill and strong intellect. Happily, Luther’s “Concerning Christian Liberty” had a place on the syllabus. I eagerly anticipated the discussion.

To my surprise, its opening salvos emphasized participants’ dissatisfaction with the text. Sure, Christians are free “lords of all things” and also “servant[s] of all and subject to all.”1 “But what,” one student questioned, “do I do with that?” For her, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, with its daily checkboxes for thirteen virtues in a “Plan for Attaining Moral Perfection,” had stronger appeal. I encounter discomfort with Luther among secular political theorists, as well. His emphasis on man’s standing before God and the accompanying relational anthropology, as well as his complex positions vis-àvis reason and scholasticism, can present challenges.3 Luther didn’t sit down to write systematic philosophy. He wrote of God’s dealings with us, rather than of what our ethical resources can achieve.

Enter Perelandra. The second installment in Lewis’s science fiction trilogy— with its studied translation of medieval thought and its triumphant imagination of unfallen Man’s kingly capacities can appear to be a “strange bedfellow” for Lutheran thought. Although Perelandra might not seem like the most “Lutheran” of Lewis’s works, its emphases on lived tension and Christ’s redemptive work, made clear in Lewis’s choice of setting for his Eden-esque drama, provides much for Lutherans to love.

In this article, I will review themes Lewis sought to incorporate into Perelandra from medieval and ancient thought, highlighting how these themes frame Lewis’s elaboration of Perelandra’s setting—the famed floating islands of Venus. I will then explore how this setting and the core conflict born of it speak to Lutheran thought. The Perelandrian characters’ relationships to “fixed land,” along with protagonist Ransom’s role in setting right those relationships, underscore how God’s grace in Christ frees contemporary Lutherans to dwell in living, balanced trust.

Dancing in Deep Heaven: Perelandra in Intellectual Context

Perelandra recounts the second voyage into space of Dr. Elwin Ransom, a middle-age academic living in 1940s England. Having been kidnapped and taken to Mars in the trilogy’s first novel, Ransom is now willingly transported to Venus by “eldila” —angels, in the trilogy’s language. When he arrives, he meets one of the planet’s two rational inhabitants: the Green Lady, the unfallen Mother of that world.

As the novel unfolds, Ransom discovers his task. He must help the Lady resist the temptations of the Evil One, who has entered the planet via the possession of Ransom’s former kidnapper, Dr. Weston. The novel recounts the luscious beauty Ransom finds in Perelandra, the Green Lady’s paradisal innocence and splendor, and the gripping battle of temptation and persuasion between Ransom and the demonic forces seeking Perelandra’s fall.

While it imaginatively probes what might have occurred in our own earthly Paradise, Lewis’s repackaging of Eve’s temptation isn’t only an exercise in understanding our Mother. The Ransom Trilogy grew from a wager between Lewis and fellow Inkling J.R.R. Tolkien, who felt that “there was too little of what they liked” in stories.4 Lewis sought to craft a mythology within science fiction that would bring medieval thinking to modern imaginations.5 This effort fit into a broader project across all Lewis’s fiction, as he aimed to serve as a “modern Boethius,” translating medieval thought for the modern reader.6

Throughout Perelandra, references to antiquity and medievalism abound. Terrestrial myths come to life in unfallen Venus. Ransom’s first impressions of Perelandra evoke the Hesperides’ garden of Greek mythology.7 This is not accidental; the Hesperides’ role as apple guarders points to the novel’s broader theme, a temptation tale influenced by Milton’s Paradise Lost.8 Lewis’s well-documented literary and imaginative fascination with Aphrodite also expresses itself richly in Perelandra.9 Throughout Ransom’s experience, Venus bears all the characteristics of the goddess of love and of the “third heaven” of medieval cosmology: it is fertile, sensuous, watery, maternal, luscious, and inexpressibly beautiful.

The Ransom Trilogy also displays Lewis’s Platonism, with each book closely tied to one part of the Platonic soul.10 Perelandra deals with the “belly,” or the appetitive part of the soul. For Plato, the appetitive soul pertains to bodily aspects of human life, “that with which it loves, hungers, thirsts, and feels the flutter and titillation of other desires.”11 Thus in Perelandra, Lewis works to explore what unfallen human appetite might look like. He depicts a fully-embodied life, bursting with movement from one uncorrupted and gratified desire to the next, from pleasure to pleasure.

Their Only Shape is Inconstant: Floating Lands as More than Setting

What has all this to do with Lutheranism? For most Lutheran laypeople, Luther is understood as a theologian first focused on sin and what God does about it. Through the Law, we see our utter brokenness before the Father. The Green Lady’s perfection, amidst the staggering abundance of Perelandra, seems unfamiliar ground for nurturing the seeds of Lutheran understanding.

Moreover, the extent to which Luther fits within the Christian Platonist tradition and the nature of his contributions to medieval scholasticism have been matters of complex academic debate.12 Of course, the Lutheran tradition does speak to these questions, but to my mind, the critical touchpoint between Perelandra and Lutheran thought comes not in these debates, but rather in the novel’s setting. The medievalism Lewis worked into the Perelandrian landscape is essentially important in grasping the full import of this setting, and it is from the setting and the characters’ relationship to it that Lutherans have most to learn.

When Ransom first enters Perelandra, through a spectacle of colors and motion, he realizes he is floating on the waves of a green ocean under a heraldic golden sky. He has been “born” into the waters of Venus;13 there is no land in sight. With time he becomes weary of swimming, but on the edge of fear, he grasps the fringe of a floating mat of aquatic plants, tightly woven as turf and able to support him. He then finds the floating island full of paradisal fruit. Ransom has no need for concern over where he will rest or what he will eat while on Venus. In this unfallen world, his appetite can wander from good to good, taking whatever meets his hand.

This geography has more than bodily significance. The Green Lady knows no need for stability or security, because her entire environment is an abundant gift. Her life is constantly in motion, in a state of complete reliance on what God will bring. “[T]hat is the nature of the floating islands of Perelandra… their only shape is the inconstant shape of the water beneath them.”14

The Green Lady knows no need for stability or security, because her entire environment is an abundant gift. Her life is constantly in motion, in a state of complete reliance on what God will bring.

As Ransom’s situation unfolds, he learns that Perelandra does have “fixed” as well as floating lands. There is a firm stone island like those of our own world in the midst of the Perelandrian sea. But God (called Maleldil in the language of Perelandra) has forbidden the Lady from staying on the Fixed Land overnight. The Fixed Lands of Perelandra are Eden’s Tree, and the central desire of the evil spirit possessing Weston is subtly to persuade the Lady to disobey this prohibition. Evil beckons her to grasp at the stability of the fixed land, disobeying Maleldil’s voice and shattering the bliss of Venusian paradise.

With this central conflict, the full import of Perelandra’s setting is made evident. Lewis claimed that the floating islands were not initially intended as a teaching device. Rather, they came to him as a mental picture before he conceived of the novel’s plot.15 Around this image, he wrote a myth to bring his reader to enjoy certain truths. However, if the islands weren’t initially intended to teach, Lewis’s genius in uniting threads of medieval thought nevertheless imbues them with great meaning.

In Dante’s Paradiso, the sensuousness of those in the sphere of Venus 16 suggests the seeds of abundant, lavish receiving. With Plato’s appetitive soul, we see desire’s impulse to go beyond what it receives. From Milton’s Paradise Lost, we gain the structure of the temptation story. And in Venus herself, born on the sea foam, we see how the “mental picture” of floating islands became the perfect device for bringing these themes together, giving the setting an essential role in the novel. The floating lands of Venus, in their abundance and provision, are the perfect environment for walking with trust, hand in hand with Maleldil.17 The fixed lands, though they provide an opportunity for obedience, also beckon the Lady to walk out of trust and into self-reliance.

To Desire the Fixed: Living Tensions in Lutheran Life and Thought

Here we see our own relationship to the floating and fixed lands. In Christian thought and life, temptations to cling to control—represented by the “Fixed Land”—continually arise. “The reason for not yet living on the Fixed Land is now so plain,” exclaims the Lady when she finally understands. “How could I wish to live there except because it was Fixed? And why should I desire the Fixed except to make sure—to be able on one day to command where I should be the next and what should happen to me? It was to reject the wave to draw my hands out of Maleldil’s, to say to Him, ‘Not thus, but thus’ to put in our own power what times should roll towards us…”18

For the Lady in her unfallen innocence, the Fixed Land represents possibility the potential to obey or disobey. Among fallen humans, however, seeking the “fixed land” of control, stability, and certainty is a way of life. Our worries over finances, ambitions, and self-presentation betray this fact. For my fellow scholars in the humanities seminar, control looked like self-improvement, contributing something concrete toward their own ethical good standing. For many Lutherans, the error can come on the other side—we cling to our “good theology” as fixed land, turning the knowledge that we’re not “hung up on our own works” into a matter of prideful security.

We cling to our “good theology” as fixed land, turning the knowledge that we’re not “hung up on our own works” into a matter of prideful security.

Theologically, our proclivity toward fixed land can also look like rejection of challenging questions in favor of straightforward answers that feel more “solid.” Rejection of neat categories and intellectual certainty are the very qualities in Luther that can confuse academic audiences. Biermann writes, “Christian theology, especially when practiced with a Lutheran emphasis, is consummately about dualities. Dualities are deeply embedded in faithful Christian confession.… [T]his penchant for dialectical truths that must be held in tension…is not some sectarian peculiarity or willful trait. It is simply the inevitable byproduct of a preoccupation with God’s word incarnate in Christ and revealed in scripture…”19 As Lutherans, we attest to tensions in our thinking and our living: we deal with those around us as “at once saints and sinners.” We proclaim Christ fully human and fully divine. We point to God’s work in the temporal and spiritual kingdoms. We wrestle with the “now and not yet” of eschatology.

Perelandra, in its unfallen state, offers a contrast to our experience. Ransom often finds that two truths that would sit uncomfortably together in our world are fully expressed with ease in the Green Lady and her Perelandrian environment.20 Of the Lady’s wisdom and innocence, Ransom finds “Opposites met in her and were fused in a fashion for which we have no images... The alert, inner silence which looked out from those eyes overawed him; yet at any moment she might laugh like a child…”21

We are fallen, and struggle to grasp God’s fullness. Guided by the Spirit, we work to hold scriptural truths in lived tension, but too often trust is swamped by confusion. The enticement of “fixed land” draws us toward one pole or the other of the tightly-bound dualities that frame our faith life. “[T]he failure to preserve critical tensions in theology without succumbing to a mutually exclusive polarity or binary opposition is the culprit behind almost all errant teaching,” and thus also to blame for problems in Christian lives, Biermann concludes.22 We seek the safety of the “fixed”—in our lives, in our thoughts, in our salvation. But as the Lady rightly asks, having chosen the fixed land, how can we climb “back into love and trust again?”

“I too am Called Ransom”: Redeeming Relationship with the Fixed Lands

As the Green Lady’s temptation toward the fixed land persists, Ransom finds himself repeatedly thinking, “This can’t go on.” Satan’s onslaught, through the shell of Weston, seems more and more irresistible with time. Surely the Lady’s innocence will shatter.

One night, in the course of a prayerful monologue that constitutes some of Lewis’s most chillingly beautiful and intellectually honest writing, Ransom learns the full import of his role on Perelandra. Ransom is not meant simply to spar intellectually with the Tempter. In Perelandra, our embodied natures are on full display: Ransom experiences all the pleasures of the “belly,”23 he argues against Weston’s worship of “the Life Force” solely for its spiritual qualities,24 and his role in the central conflict will be bodily, as well. Since the Tempter’s foothold on Perelandra is through Weston’s body, Ransom must fight and slay this body to bring the temptation to an end.

When faced with the realization of his full task, Ransom initially recoils. First, he sees the idea of relieving the Lady’s temptation by external means, through brute force, as a sort of cop-out. His logic doesn’t hold up for long in light of the Incarnation. Then, he sees the idea of himself as Maleldil’s bodily representative on Venus as self-aggrandizing “megalomania.” But this argument falls flat, as well. Christ’s work as our earthly ransom on the cross has made us His representatives; Maleldil reminds the protagonist that He, too, is “called Ransom,” and through Ransom he will now work.

In his sacrificial efforts to help the Green Lady, Ransom is clearly a Christ-figure.

The physical conflict tests to the full the courageous spirit Ransom developed on Mars.25 In his sacrificial efforts to help the Green Lady, Ransom is clearly a Christ-figure. Near the novel’s conclusion, Ransom spends three days in the depths of the earth —in an emphatically “fixed” setting that has hallmarks of Dante’s Inferno. 26 Before the end, he will both receive a wound to the heel that never fully heals and crush the head of the Tempter.27 Ransom acts as Maleldil’s representative, and by Maleldil’s hand working through Ransom, Perelandra’s innocence remains unshattered.

After the battle, Ransom participates in the coronation of the Green Lady and the King. Having resisted temptation, they ascend to the throne of Perelandra to rule. Significantly, the coronation occurs on the Fixed Land, no longer forbidden. Ransom’s actions have permitted the Lady to retain her innocence. The Fixed Lands are no more under a prohibition; right relationship is secured, and the ground is now firmly paved with trust.

Receive and Be Glad: Perelandra as a Spur to Lutheran Evangelism

The triumphant grace of Maleldil, working through his representative, resounds through the core drama of Perelandra. With the story’s details in mind, its distinctive relevance for Lutheran thinking and life becomes clear. The relational nature of our walk with God, full of tensions in our own “now-but-not-yet” world, is underscored by its fluid setting. The ascent to the fixed ground of a fully restored relationship with God, which we on the “silent planet” glimpse, but still await in eager expectation, is made plain in Lewis’s imaginative world of innocence retained. While Lewis may not have set out to teach with his floating lands, the truths they convey, drawn from the rich background of his medieval thinking, certainly make them didactic in character.

With this teaching comes the novel’s spur to evangelism, as well. Like Ransom, Lutherans recognize that we have all become “little Christs” since the Incarnation. “[A]s our heavenly Father has in Christ freely come to our aid, we also ought freely to help our neighbor through our body and its works, and each one should become as it were a Christ to the other...”28

Like Ransom, Lutherans recognize that we have all become “little Christs” since the Incarnation.

One way Perelandra equips us to do so is by pointing our neighbor to the heights of perfection we have lost. “[L]ife on what Lewis called our ‘silent planet’ is one cut off… we enjoy only the most remote inklings of…divine goodness.”29 Instead, for postmodern people, life’s quest for control alternates between hedonism and self-justification. On one hand, our neighbor ignores larger questions about divine goodness in a quest to keep pleasure at his beck and call. Alternatively, his distraction is punctuated by frenzied self-help, attempts at moral improvement that would make my peers in the humanities seminar proud. It can be hard to find opportunities to preach the Gospel when those around us are unaware of their brokenness.

Helpfully, the holiness and splendor of Perelandra’s King and Queen draw an unbearable contrast with our fallen state, for both Ransom and for the reader. Lewis famously wrote, “We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea."30 Lewis’s examination of the unfallen life helps us see our own fallenness more clearly. This, in turn, allows the Law to work, so that we can ultimately point our neighbor to the splendor that awaits him in Christ.

When the King and Queen are crowned, a new birth occurs on the morning star.31 As Lutheran Christians, we await such a birth on our own planet. Perelandra offers meaningful support in our waiting: it richly awakens our imaginations with medieval thought, encourages us to embrace lived tensions in its undulating setting, and reminds us of what a gloriously restored relationship will be, as the humble Dr. Ransom points us to the true Morning Star.32

Dr. Amy Lakeman is a wife, mother, and part-time scholar. She received her PhD in Government from Harvard University. She is a long-time Lewisphile and a member of Trinity Lutheran Church (LCMS) in Springfield, Illinois.

Endnotes:

1. Martin Luther, Concerning Christian Liberty, produced by Elizabeth T. Knuth and David Widger (Project Gutenberg, 2013), https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1911/1911-h/1911-h.htm.

2. Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, edited by Frank Woodworth Pine and produced by Turgut Dincer and Brian Sogard (Project Gutenberg, 2022), https://www.gutenberg.org/files/20203/20203-h/20203-h.htm.

3. Jennifer Hockenbery Dragseth, ed., The Devil’s Whore: Reason and Philosophy in the Lutheran Tradition (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2011); For a brief summary on this topic, see Robert Stern and Volker Leppin, “Martin Luther,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman (Spring 2025 Edition), https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2025/entries/luther, especially sections 3-4.

4. Martha C. Sammons, A Guide Through C.S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy (Westchester, IL: Cornerstone Books, 1980), 16.

5. In doing so, Lewis sought to claim the science fiction genre for Christianity. Tolkien’s task was to craft a time travel tale that served the same function, and Numenor grew from this project. J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fall of Numenor, edited by Brian Sibley (New York: William Morrow, 2022), xxi; See also James D. Lopp, III, “The Fissure Within the Spiritual Geography of C.S. Lewis’s Perelandra,” in Inklings Forever, Volume IV: A Collection of Essays Presented at The Fourth Frances White Ewbank Colloquium on C.S. Lewis & Friends (Upland, IN: Taylor University, 2004).

6. I use “medieval” broadly and include works of ancient thought, in parallel to Lewis’s understanding that these authors were all “in league” and part of the “Long Middle Ages.” See Jason M. Baxter, The Medieval Mind of C. S. Lewis: How Great Books Shaped a Great Mind (Downers Grove: Intervarsity Press [Kindle Edition]), 11.

7. C.S. Lewis, Perelandra (New York: Scribner, 2003 [1972]), 40. All subsequent references in this article to Perelandra come from this edition; The Hesperides were the “Daughters of the Evenings” in Greek Mythology, who guarded a tree of golden apples. Lewis also associates this myth with Venus in The Magician’s Nephew, his Venusian Chronicle of Narnia. Michael Ward, Planet Narnia (Oxford: Oxford University Press [Kindle Edition], 2008), 165.

8. Walter Hooper, C. S. Lewis: A Companion and Guide (San Francisco: Harper, 1996), 221.

9. Ward, Planet Narnia, 164.

10. Hayden Head, “Triad within Triad: The Tripartite Soul as a Structural Design in C.S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy” in C.S. Lewis and the Inklings: Reflections on Faith, Imagination and Modern Technology, edited by Jason Fisher, Mark R. Hall, Salwa Khoddam (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015); Rhys Laverty, “A Taste of Paradise: Naming, Restraining, and Embracing Pleasure on Perelandra,” in Life on the Silent Planet, edited by Rhys Laverty (Landrum, SC: Davenant Press, 2024).

11. Plato, The Republic, section 439(d), as cited in Head, “Triad within Triad,” 67.

12. See, for example, the debates outlined in Ilmari Karimies, Martin Luther's Understanding of Faith and Reality (1513-1521): The Influence of Augustinian Platonism and Illumination in Luther's Thought (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2022), and Gifford A. Grobien “What is the Natural Law?” in Natural Law: A Lutheran Reappraisal, edited by Robert C. Baker and Roland Cap Ehlke (St Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 2011), 32-33; I note that Lewis’s Platonism exceeds that of Luther, especially in his adoption of Christian Platonists’ influence in his angelology and certain other aspects of his theology. James Bryson, “‘It’s all in Plato’: Platonism, Cambridge Platonism, and C.S. Lewis,” Journal of Inklings Studies 11:1 (2021), 7.

13. Christiana Hale, “Enjoyment and Contemplation: The Green Lady, Self-Knowledge, and Growth in Maturity,” in Life on the Silent Planet, edited by Rhys Laverty (Landrum, SC: Davenant Press, 2024), 82.

14. Lewis, Perelandra, 36.

15. Hooper, C.S. Lewis, 220; The image may have been influenced by the wandering lands of Spenser’s Fairie Queen. Paul R. Rovang “A Spenserian Returns to Earth: ‘The Faerie Queene’ in ‘That Hideous Strength,’” Mythlore 34:2 (2016), 38.

16. Ward, Planet Narnia, 166.

17. Dante is a potential source of inspiration for the floating lands in multiple ways. See also Laverty, “A Taste of Paradise,” 144.

18. Perelandra, 179.

19. Joel Biermann, Wholly Citizens (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2017), xiii.

20. These themes also arise in the repeat dualities that the reader encounters, including in Lewis’s approach to gender later in the novel, or the way that natural/supernatural or myth/fact intersect in an unfallen world.

21. Lewis, Perelandra, 56.

22. Biermann, Wholly Citizens, xv.

23. Head, “Triad within Triad,” 67.

24. Lewis, Perelandra, 78; see also Lewis’s note at the end of Ch. 4 of Mere Christianity for a nonfiction iteration of this argument.

25. Head, “Triad within Triad,” 67.

26. Sammons, A Guide, 93.

27. Gen. 3:15, English Standard Version Bible (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2016). Though Lewis clearly intends Ransom as a Christ-figure, he also addresses the distinction between salvation as “prevention” in the case of Perelandra and salvation as “repair” in the case of our own world. See Lewis, Perelandra, 103-104, and 122-123. See also note 3 in Laverty, “A Taste of Paradise,” 124. I thank Rev. Aaron Mueller for highlighting this distinction and for his thoughtful comments on this piece.

28. Luther, Concerning Christian Liberty, par. 79.

29. Bryson, “It’s all in Plato,” 7.

30. C. S. Lewis, “The Weight of Glory,” in The Weight of Glory (New York: HarperCollins, 2001 [1949]), 26.

31. Ward, Planet Narnia, 169.

32. Rev. 22:16, English Standard Version Bible (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2016).