Close reading: C. S. Lewis’ “Great Dance”
On the mystical congress of person and word
“Be comforted, small immortals. You are not the only voice that all things utter, nor is there eternal silence in the places where you cannot come.”
The divine consolation proffered by C. S. Lewis near the end of Perelandra—second title in the Space Trilogy; Old Solar name for the planet Venus—is a literal revelation, being spoken by Eldila1 to the stewards of Perelandra. But it is also a revelation in the literary sense, replete with Lewis’s ecological and anagogical2 wisdom. They continue:
“Though men or angels rule them, the worlds are for themselves. The waters you have not floated on, the fruit you have not plucked, the caves into which your bodies cannot pass, do not await your coming to put on perfection… Times without number I have circled Arbol while you were not alive, and those times were not desert. Their own voice was in them, not merely a dreaming of the day when you should awake. They also were at the centre.”
The message is profoundly indigenous, a clear rebuke of humanity’s stagnant colonial imagination. Catalyzed by apophatic3 awareness, Lewis reveals the intellectual refulgence of humility: everything we cannot perceive or conquer is a center unto itself. Humility renders infinite perfection conceivable.
This is all part of what Lewis called the “Great Dance”—the entanglement and significance—of the cosmos, from subatomic particles to celestial bodies.
Theology has a term for this paradoxical sort of attitude: panentheism, which from its Greek components translates literally to “all in God.”4 The preposition here is key to distinguishing the idea from the more familiar pantheism, “all-God.” Pan-en-theism means that the divine intersects with and also exceeds every part of the universe. Thomas Keating put it well:
“Panentheism means that God is present in all creation by virtue of [their] omnipresence and omnipotence, sustaining every creature in being without being identified with any creature.” (emphasis mine)
Reading Perelandra, one cannot help but perceive this dance in the congress of people and language: to see words themselves as beings, exemplary “small immortals,” capable yet limited, independent yet contingent, endowed with providence (over meaning). We could read the epigraph anew: “Though men or angels rule them, the words are for themselves.”
a.k.a. the Light Ones and the Powers, Eldila are “super-human extraterrestrials, similar to angels, or devas, and sometimes mistaken for gods.” You can read more about Lewis’ fascinating conception of angelic beingness in this entry on The Silent Planet Wiki, a reference site for supernerds like me.
Relating to the ultimate spiritual destiny of humanity; in Medieval Christian exegesis, the highest level of textual meaning. See: OUP
Knowledge (particularly theological) obtained by negation, e.g. “love is not cruel”
The German philosopher Karl Krause (1781-1832) is responsible for the term.